The bleeding edge: What keeps us this side of that dark line?

“What keeps us this side of that dark line?” is Mestroms most personal work to date. Usually physically absent from her work, the questions posed in Mestroms previous text-based wall paintings hover over the viewer, above and beyond, suspended by the strings of an invisible puppeteer: “Will judgement hurt when it falls on you?”, “Take away a mans name and what is left?”, “I know you, you’ll never be done”, to mention just a few.

In the three components that make up this exhibition (wall painting, series of nine images and video projection), we see the artist for the first time as the subject of her own work. Naked and vulnerable, she paints this wall work not with the flawless brushstrokes we are familiar with in her work, but with her own body.

In this work, the text 'What keeps us this side of that dark line?' is not externalised from the subject (the body, the person, the artist), but rather internalised. Mestrom often positions the viewer in such a way that they become aware of themselves – not simply as a viewer of art, but as an existential being. What she refers to as the “politic” of her wall-paintings is the understanding of how cultural texts--be they literary, philosophical, or physical (in the sense that gender codes are "texts" written on our bodies and in our psyches)--shape our everyday lives.

‘What keeps us this side of that dark line?' positions the viewer, curiously, on the side of the artist as she draws an uncertain boundary around herself, along the walls of the gallery space which contain both her and “us” as we view the work. It is as though the artist is drawing the bleeding edge along which an artists practice is always negotiated. It doesn’t exist before she does – the artist draws the somewhat inconsistent line as she moves through space, creating an uncertain boundary. The blotchy line appears to collapse a division of positions: “this side” and “that side” are no longer in opposition. The unknown ‘other’ is at once among us and distant.

Despite the brevity of her sentences, Mestroms works are never a ‘one-liner’. You cannot simply see her projects, have a giggle and move on. With Mestroms practice you know there is always more than meets the eye – she asks you to look for it and to find something of yourself in the process.

Paula Waters
August 2006
Melbourne