A history of space is the history of wars
by Dr. Kyla McFarlane writer and Assistant Curator, Exhibitions at Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2006
In these large, monochromatic watercolour drawings, Sanné Mestrom activates a wild spatial realm. Space is mutable and unsettled, constructed from a cataclysmic arrangement of shard-like forms that crash into the picture from above and below, pressing into our field of vision in a rush of overlapping contours. Unsettled, and without the secure foothold of a single-point perspective, each composition alludes to the presence of a larger continuum, a massive unravelling of space that can be imagined well beyond the paper’s edge.
Looking over these fractured worlds, we struggle to maintain a stable point
of view. As we follow the edge of one form it is likely to be interrupted by
another moving in a different direction. Elsewhere, veils of tone, both light
and dark, conflate surface and depth. Or our eye might come to rest on a shape
defined by its opacity, its singular blackness creating a geometric gash, an
open wound surrounded by the clutter of three-dimensionality. In one work, black
paper collaged to the drawing further confuses the delineations between figure
and ground. In their spatial restlessness, these drawings encourage a perceptual
paradox. Mestrom entices us to linger over the intricacy of their veiled and
crystalline forms, whilst the accumulated fortress of these same forms simultaneously
locks us out, asserting the work as an impenetrable surface. This mixed-message
encourages the viewer to apprehend the image in small jolts as the eye traverses
the work in fits and starts that are guided by the spatial turbulence within.
:::
Whilst they play with the vagaries of space, these works are not simply exercises
in form. A history of space is the history of wars positions space
as a battleground. Indeed, the history of represented space is the history of
ideologies, of a series of dominant ‘scopic regimes’ and perspectives,
in which conceptions of the viewer have been imagined in relation to a series
of received representational frameworks. In this context, the eyes of Mestrom’s
viewer, agitated and active, can perhaps be contrasted with the singular, stationary
eye of a viewer faced by a representation guided by the serene linearity of
single-point perspective ¶.
Of course, a series of drawings cannot carry the weight of the contested history
of space, nor can the viewer of these works be positioned as the heavy container
for a critique of vision within this history. Instead, A history of space
is the history of wars continues Mestrom’s ongoing, critical engagement
with space as an active, political and contested realm, developed in tandem
with an interest in the discourse of language as a similarly activated system.
In The myth of a political vision 2004, Mestrom employed the nineteenth
century device of the stereoscope in order to activate and emphasise a virtual
space between the viewer and the work. In A man’s name, exhibited
at TCB Art Inc. in October 2005, Mestrom literally posed the question “Take
away a man’s name and what is left?’ in gouache on the darkened
walls of the gallery. The words tumbled into the darkness as if echoing the
dislocated state that namelessness brings to the forgotten subject. Both projects
seek to animate and re-evaluate certain conventions. In the former, it is the
practice of looking. Here, the stereoscope, a highly popular visual mechanism
from the nineteenth century, is projected into the virtually mediated realm
of the twenty-first century. In the latter, it is the received notion of language
as a marker of a man’s place in the world, a patriarchal conceit that
Mestrom unravels in the space of the gallery. In each of these projects, a subject
is placed squarely within the ‘frame’ of the work, whether it is
the viewer looking through the stereoscope, or the nameless, floating subject
imagined in A man’s name. Similarly, whilst the works in this
current exhibition are tightly bound by the edge of the picture, the presence
of a viewer standing in space, eyes engaged in a restless dance of active looking,
is necessary to fully activate the work in the context of Mestrom’s oeuvre.
:::
In a 2006 performance work entitled ‘what keeps us this side of the
dark line?’, Mestrom made her way around the perimeter of a gallery
space, painting a black line along the wall with her paint-covered body as she
went. The residue of this performance is a dripping band of paint that circumnavigates
the room - a line determined by the pressing of the artist’s body against
the boundary of the white cube, a potent metaphor for the laws of engagement
in art practice.
In this age of computer-aided drawing, Mestrom’s monochromes enact a certain
trickery. At first glance they are flawlessly executed, as if by a sophisticated
drawing machine or high-resolution printer. In fact, they are painstakingly
inked by hand over time, a careful act that results in a perfect surface that
ironically mimics the mechanical. At the edge of the work, however, there is
an occasional puncturing of this apparent seamlessness. This can be found in
the pools of ink and water that culminate in a watery edge running counter to
the geometries working their way across the picture. This staining of the picture
plane, aided and abetted by gravity’s pull, reminds us of the active relationship
between ink, water and paper that occurs in the making of these drawings. Like
the dripping band of paint that formed the ‘dark line’ in Mestrom’s
gallery performance, these watery pools are evidence of material process. Contained
by the paper’s edge whilst leaking towards it, they echo the drag and
drip of the skeins of paint formed by the movement of the artist’s body
as it marks out the space of the gallery. Such residues remind us that, despite
the persistence of ideological boundaries, it is possible to pull at the seams
of the representational screen.
www.mestrom.org
Dr. Kyla McFarlane is a writer and Assistant Curator, Exhibitions at Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2006