From Andrew Frost…
The German film director Werner Herzog has many fine and wild stories attached to his fame, notably among them being shot while being interviewed for UK TV, having a ship hauled over a mountain for his film Fitzcarraldo or empathising with the bears featured in his documentary Grizzly Man which was about a fake-Australian and would-be naturalist who lived with wild bears and was subsequently eaten by one. Artist Sarah Mosca draws on another wild but little-known story about the director walking from Munich to Paris in an effort to restore health his dying mentor Lotte Eisner believing that somehow the act of walking would produce a miraculous transformation.
For her exhibition Useless Gestures, Mosca has created another kind of transformation: strapping single sheets of photographic paper to her chest and then going for a series of walks, Mosca has created a fascimilie of Herzog’s process but where the director’s action resulted in magical thinking, Mosca’s sojourns have resulted in a series of large scale abstracts that visual suggest the penetration of light into the paper but little else is as literal. Mosca’s interest is in themes of optimise, failure and history and ideas of permanence and transience. Like Herzog’s act of walking, the outcome of Mosca’s work is intriguing but also elegantly ambiguous – something might have occurred her – but the question is what?
Until August 17
Galerie Pompom, Chippendale
Pic: Sarah Mosca, Untitled Walk #5 (soft gesture), 2014. Pigment print, 110 x 90 cm.
