Pretty air and useful things
- Authors: Bell, Dan , Mestrom, Sanne , Vivian, Alex
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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The Dance
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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- Description: The Dance, based on Matisse's infamous painting of the same name, consists of a series of stainless-stell figure-based abstraction that appeara march or dance through the site. With reference to international modernist art history, the 'figure' embodies the lingering remainder of their original pictorial counterpart. The artistic innovation of this work lies in the inversion of icons of modernism into feminised, functional and contemporary form, through the use of insightful and witty subversions. The aim of The Dance is to question the authority of the art museum as an institution of established historical fact - inviting art history itself to leave the gallery behind and enter the hinterlands of the Otways, where it shares a social space with the living heartbeat of its people.
Dr Sanne Mestrom
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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- Description: Drawing from alternative currencies, banking archives, pop culture and contemporary art, Creative Accounting scratched below the surface of the economic system to reveal money’s enigmatic side. Money is many things at once-an abstract rendering of value, an agent of propaganda, a decorative device. It plays a central role in all of our lives yet is often overlooked as an object of contemplation. Creative Accounting brought to light some of the stories that surround currency-from the history of banking to the intricacies of anti-counterfeit patterns. Casting a critical eye, the exhibition aimed to reinvigorate our engagement with money and the economic system beyond next week’s pay packet or the latest stock market crisis.
Weeping woman
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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The Internal Logic
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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The Bell curve
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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- Description: Weeping woman
Ode to form
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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Compression Chamber
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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Future primitive
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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- Description: Untitled 2011; The Dance 1909; Karma Sutra #3; Karma Sutra #7; Untitled 2013
Untitled III
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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- Description: We exist not just as a brain that thinks but as a body that feels. Art’s gesture and trace is a good way of marking how a person lives in stuff and works on that stuff. The world though works on us too, pushing us, and shaping us with its pressures and forces. Art often embodies both sides of this being-in-the-world and how we explore it. The Bathysphere is a scientific invention, a submersible that similarly manifests this human drive; just as we thought we had mapped the world we used this machine to place our bodies at the bottom of oceans. In this show even the two-dimensional works are haptic in their way. James Kerr’s Desiccated Vases look like abstract painting and on one hand that is right. But they are also boxes filled with crushed petals which, fetish like, ask the “viewer” to pick up and shake the insides, even the static moves the things around. Petals are evocative of so much: Spring, love and (here dried) memories and keepsakes. Similarly Kate Mitchell’s Artist As Pooped archives the artist’s performance of using props to keep her eyes open. Like cartoon logic, or even Dali’s crutches, it is a fantastical image that talks of the artist’s body and the work that is done by and on that body for art. In the ceramic work of Sanne Mestrom and Addison Marshall both play on modernist tropes in certain ways, not with irony, but in a contemporary hybrid way where all valences of different art periods are at play. So perhaps most obviously in Mestrom’s work the totemic shapes speak to high modernism, the work of Picasso and Brancusi for example. They are declassed though, a little rickety, a little softer now, made in clay instead of marble or steel. The aesthetic of the irregular dots and the obviously hand painted glazes also undermine modernism’s minimalism. The work also seems very primal, with simple cups recalling their ancient forebears. This is not appropriation but the polyvalence many styles brought together. In fact a lot of the material in the show has a deep and long history (the petals, the twig, the eyelashes, the string) and the artists are knowingly playing with that. Marshall’s work has a similar disconcerting hybridity. The rainbow connection: bound and gagged is undoubtedly a curious collection. The rainbow piece is a little phallic and recalls the surrealist object. Gagged looks found, like a little test-piece picked up from the studio floor, but it also recalls a small pelvis or even a cloth. Bound seems cartoony in someway, a little fetish animal crawling on the floor. They are abstractly modern but with so many resonances these simple forms open up into many poetic possibilities (most obviously some sort of sexual play). Finally Jasper Knight’s Alley Oop is a totally found object, following in the surrealist tradition of the artist choosing objects that resonate for them. With its back to the viewer, shining into the corner like some naughty child, the work emits an otherworldly green glow turning the whole exhibition into an Aladdin’s cave. Again what makes this work a contemporary found object is that what is shown is its shipping crate. Somehow the LA neon has been stripped of its Californian sheen; the work is as much about global dislocation and loss as it is about cocktails. In all these works it is the material of the object that speaks most loudly to us. What is the seduction of neon? Of petals? It is something known as much through the body as through the eyes.
Art & Australia / Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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The reclining nude
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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- Description: We are pleased to be showing Sanné Mestrom’s new exhibition The Reclining Nude. This body of work was produced at her recent residency at Gertrude Street Gallery over the last two years and was shown in exhibition at Gertrude Street. This body of work is an extension and more mature reification of ideas that Mestrom began in her PhD work at Monash; Chalk Horse exhibited this body of work in 2009 at the old space and we have continued to support Mestrom since then. The Nothing Show, curated by Westspace’s Kelly Fliedner, was another serious outing within a group show, at the gallery for Mestrom’s work. Sanné Mestrom won the Kath Fries Art Prize last year having been shown as a finalist the year before. She was also shown in Social Sculpture, Anna Schwartz Gallery, curated wonderfully by Charlotte Day. What characterises Mestrom’s work is a fusion of different approaches to sculpture and conceptual installation through the twentieth century. She is an adept archivist who conflates and juxtaposes different methodologies to poetic ends. For example on one hand her work seems to recall Arte Povera or the object found by chance seen in the surrealist object, this aspect of her work was focused on in Social Sculpture. But then Mestrom recombines this poor, or industrial material or refuse with the aims of high modernism: Picasso, Matisse and Henry Moore (surrealist?). Is there a humour in the contrasts or does it create a more serious rupture? It is the sense of breadth and confusion that in the end creates the power in her work. Perhaps like Aby Warburg or more anthropological approaches to art, Mestrom seems to tap into more primal feelings towards the object and towards art’s materiality. In her eloquent visual essay, which we ask you to take away with you, Mestrom has moved from ancient votives to high modernism. What is it about the sculptural object, installed in a sacred space (the altar, the white cube) that makes us believe in things we share: beauty, love and other absolutes. -Oliver Watts, 2012
Thinking Props
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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- Description: Viscopy is pleased to announce Sanné Mestrom the winner of the John Fries Memorial Prize 2011 for emerging visual artists. Mestrom received the $10,000 prize at the opening of the exhibition of the fifteen finalists last night at Blackfriars off Broadway, Viscopy’s contemporary art space in Chippendale. The prize was awarded by acclaimed Sydney artist, Lindy Lee. Mestrom's winning Visual art work, Thinking Props features in the exhibition with the other fourteen finalists: Cyrus Tang, Erica Molesworth, Eva Hampel, Heath Franco, Jennifer O'Brien, Karl Khoe & Tessa Zettel, Keiko Matsui, Kristel Britcher, Kurt Sorensen, Nathan Taylor, Pauletta Kerinauia, Susie Nelson, Wade Marynowsky and Walter Brecely. The winning entry was selected by an auspicious panel of judges including Anna Davis, media artist and Museum of Contemporary Art curator, Hannah Bertram the 2010 John Fries Memorial Prize winner, Danie Mellor contemporary Indigenous artist and 2009 National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award winner and Kath Fries, artist and Viscopy Board member. Mestrom's sculptural installation Thinking Props plays with the idea of a physical prop designed to promote cerebral and psychological contemplation. Made from everyday found objects, the work consists of three components: a table, a cluster of door handles and a “joy prop”. Her table is tailored to one assuming the classic position of Auguste Rodin's The Thinker, with elbow placed on table enclave and chin on cupped hand. It is a physical prop that encourages cerebral revelation. A grid of door handles below the table suggests opening doors, that endless possibilities and zones of discovery are just a simple action away. In front of the table sits a “joy prop” constructed of a cast bronze mould hypothetically designed to be fitted into the mouth to force a smile. Danie Mellor says of the Mestrom’s Visual art work: “In her winning entry for the 2011 John Fries Memorial Prize, Mestrom engages with the everyday and what she terms ‘psychological props’. Through her interest in human intimacy and this field of research and play in her practice, she presents playful and thought provoking arrangements of objects that recall Modernist engagements with the readymade. The difference with her work by comparison though, is that an intimacy is invoked that allows a bodily interaction with form, if only through the viewers’ realisation that in fact ‘this is what you (can and are supposed to) do’ with the objects. They are both familiar and out of reach as fragile objects in a gallery space, a temptation for the curious. The complexity of the potential interaction that the installation suggests, and its resolution as an intricate and multi-layered object, lends this work its intrigue and place as a well deserving winner.” The exhibition, curated by Venita Poblocki, runs until 30 September and is open between 1pm and 5pm from Wednesday to Friday. The John Fries Memorial Prize for emerging visual artists is an annual prize donated by the Fries family in memory of former Viscopy director and honorary treasurer, John Fries, who made a remarkable contribution to the life and success of Viscopy. The competition is open to emerging Australian and New Zealand artists of all ages and disciplines who are not represented in a regional, state, territory or national public art collection.
Sanne Mestrom
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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The internal logic
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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- Description: Lady with Green Stripe, 1905; Black Painting, 1959; Black Painting, 1963; The Virgins, 1913; Soft Kiss; The Reclining Nude (Nyotaimori Coffee Table), Still life with nine objects, 1954; Weeping Woman
New13
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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Bathysphere
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
- Full Text: false
- Description: Untitled III
Still life with nine objects, 1954
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
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Consequences
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
- Full Text: false
Utopian slumps and art basel
- Authors: Mestrom, Sanne
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Visual art work
- Full Text: false
- Description: Composition 1 -10; Untitled (8); Element 1-4