Anastasia Klose, 2009, The Shortest Straw: Posters, Me and Stupid Sign
Summary
Anastasia Klose has a gift for expressing the droll through her art. Her often deadpan, low-tech works have a disarming honesty about them and are very much generated by her personal experience of the world. Through a practice that ranges over video, photography, drawing, installation and performance, and which regularly incorporates textual elements, Klose uses her own lived experience to bridge the gap between art and life, encouraging the viewer to identify with the feelings provoked by her work, whether these be humour, irony, shame, loneliness, pain or anything in between. Far from being exercises in narcissism, these explorations of the ‘aesthetic of the pathetic’, as Klose’s work has been affirmatively described, provide knowing and ironic comments on the prosaic and very human acts that so commonly punctuate life.
Four works from Klose’s ‘The Shortest Straw: Posters’ series came into the Art and Heritage Collection in 2009. The artist appears in only one of these Type-C photographs, ‘Me and Stupid Sign’, a purposefully casual shot in which the artist is surrounded by unremarkable domestic paraphernalia as she pens a small placard: ‘I can’t believe things have come to this’. The works ponder who drew the shortest straw in life. In ‘Hollyhock Outside the Square’, her botanical subject apparently has been banished from the garden to flourish on the margins; in ‘Broken Tree’, a weedy sapling unceremoniously face-plants on the pavement; and in ‘Hands Off – Heritage Listed’, a wardrobe past its use-by date resists demolition through its public protest.
Each of these poster-sized photographs was produced in an edition of eight.
