“The Internal Logic”
Sanné Mestrom
19 July → 10 Aug 2013

Sanné Mestrom's Internal Logic is a partial ‘summary’ of great moments in High Modernist painting, reinterpreted through accumulations of found and constructed objects, images and materials.

Each work is a form of ‘three-dimensional collage’ or, more particularly, an overlay of seemingly dissonant elements — art and design, abstraction and function, geometry, representation and psychology — referencing the major signifiers of the period, and formed into concise physical emblems of life in contemporary culture.

The physical form of the works are drawn from meditations on – and recollections of – their original counterparts: an accumulated impression built up over a life-time of looking at art history books and museum walls, wall calendars and coasters. Through popular culture’s process of averaging, these complex and idiosyncratic sculptural ‘moments’ have had their edges shaved off; they have become simplified, softened, homogenised. And yet the status imposed on these Modernist originals looms large, continuing to exert their influence over us, as both artists and lookers.

Think: Caro, Calder, Moore’s reclining figure, Picasso’s Weeping Woman, a Juddian box, a Bourgeois spider, Brancusi’s head, Frank Lloyd Wright’s water wall, a Gormley iron man, a Hesse resin rope, a Buren stripe, a Le Corbusier chapel, a Matisse collage, a Duchampian fountain, a Tatlin construction kit…

Through the process of addition and subtraction, these sculptures of The Internal Logic embody the lingering remainder of their initial grand gesture – a distant echo – softer, and softer, but persistant.

This project has been supported by the City of Melbourne through the Arts Grants Program; the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria; and Monash University Art Design & Architecture.