Street Style

Sanne` Mestrom Things Fall Down, Sometimes We Look up

Brown Council Runaway

Chalkhorse

94 Cooper St, Surry Hills, NSW, Australia

5-21 February 2009

On at Chalkhorse this month is, what at first glance appear to be, two extremely dissimilar bodies of work. Brown Council’s Video installation Runaway, 2008, a videoed performance of women, running, but not getting anywhere, is reminiscent of a familiar dream sequence.

Sanne Mestrom’s exhibition Things Fall Down Then We Look Up, is a room full of seemingly unrelated, randomly placed objects and wall text. While Brown Council’s Runaway is hauntingly familiar, Mestroms’s work imbues a sense of enstrangement.

Brown Council, a video/performance art collaboration, formed in 2005 by Kate Blackmore, Fran Barrett, Kelly Doley and Diana Smith, is known for appropriating images, actions and sounds from film, art history and theatre.

In Runaway, the four members of Brown Council, each perform the same image of a running figure in a repeated sequence, which builds over time, set to a dramatic soundtrack and backlit -  there is a sense of action and suspense.  

The inclusion of drawn fake boobs on the performers t-shirts, who are running but not getting anywhere, while being squirted with fake blood, is a parody of the familiar film narrative, a female in jeopardy.

The most powerful element in Runaway, and what subverts the known language of film, is the adjustment of the camera angle and therefore the repositioning of the viewer. The camera faces the women straight on, no longer is the story told from the position of the protagonist or chaser, who often represents the male gaze. The viewer instead is placed in the position of the destination that the women desire, but are doomed never to arrive.

In Runaway, Brown Council enters into the well-worn but sadly still relevant discourse of feminist film theory. The device of shifting the position of the viewer unexpectedly creates a link between Brown Council’s video installation and the work by Sanne` Mestrom who also repositions the viewer in relation to perception.

Sanne` Mestrom’s multi-disciplinary practice involves photography, painting, sculpture and installation. Things Fall Down, Sometimes We Look up, uses all of these artistic devices to question perception and to evoke a sense of uncertainty or enstrangement in the viewer.

Enstrangement is when we are familiar with something, we no longer really ‘see’ it, instead we ‘recognise’ rather than actually seeing. The theory is that the purpose of art is to enstrange, making us see things in a new way and to prolong the act of looking / perception.

What at first seems to be a simple collection of everyday objects, such as a brick or piece of framed plywood, on closer inspection evolves. With the help of the room sheet, these objects are revealed as a bronze sculpture of a brick and a very convincing watercolour of a piece of plywood.

Intriguing, is that the viewer is lured into looking in the first place at works that seem deceptively simple. Sadly it is the quality of the artist’s skill of replication that could easily lead the viewer to miss the point of this exhibition.

Things Fall Down, Sometimes We Look up, questions the act of looking itself… all is not what is seems, and engagement with these works directs the viewer to question themselves in relation to the work and the world.