It all looks realistic until you really look at it and notice that I played with reality and the perception of reality, a bit like looking at the clouds and seeing all kinds of things in them.
Anna Van Oosterom’s linear collages often begin with a photograph of an indistinct urban scene, the transfer of the image, scouring and adding to papery surface to create the sense of a fleeting moment in time. The artist seeks to create a counterpoint between the anonymity of an eavesdropped conservation, unnamed moments, and suspended memories. Of the hovering lines added to these haptic compositions, Van Oosterom notes: “While first living in New York I was struck by the conversations I heard while I was waiting by a traffic light. Everybody on the telephone making doctors’ appointments, organizing dates, having a discussion, work related conversations…etc. Without a conscious thought sentences were in my mind, and I was struck how poetic they were if they were without context, there was no beginning or end to a conversation. They just floated like a poem.”
Van Oosterom begins with paper copies of her images, reducing surface to shape the painting, followed by adding layers of coloured paper, acrylic paint, pastel chalks, and matte acrylic pigment. This contemplative atelier process allows unique cartographic textures to emerge until cinematic vignettes cover the canvas. As such, Van Oosterom intends to create an open-ended locus wherein the viewer experiences a moment of the recognizable and the uncertain, upon closer examination the picture is illogical: “It all looks realistic until you really look at it and notice that I played with reality and the perception of reality, a bit like looking at the clouds and seeing all kinds of things in them."
These are memories of urbanity reflecting on the speed and color of passing trains, the architectural peculiarities of the stations: “In my subway series I show the viewer how I see the subway as a place of beauty in all its urban messiness, the loneliness, which is sometimes painfully beautiful.”
The spaces created invoke a dreamlike sense, traveling through the grisaille ugliness of the subway system, unrelated conversations, strange companions, the ordinary next to the extraordinary, this is a sculptural world of Freudian condensation. In the tradition of Robert Rauschenberg, Van Oosterom seeks to capture a sense of contemporary life, making the ordinary city life poetic, memorizing the staccato rhythmic of city life, the sitting with stranger, the everyday passage in the underground this continual “being apart and contemplating life in the big city.” In these collages there is a world of shape and lines, populated by quiet figures, a collection of words and rhythms. Black lines striate and frame, abstracting place, and identity, simultaneously enclosed and opening each image.
~ Rosa JH Berland
