without / within - a self portrait of the world. Review: Jo Meisner, “Alone Together: In the company of strangers” at One Margaret St, Sydney. By: Lisa Sharp
On a busy city corner at One Margaret Street Sydney art in a glass-walled corporate foyer reflects, barely contains and displays the herd of people moving through the city. In a visually subtle, site-specific spectacle, the reality of the moving crowd without is echoed by the evocative imagery within, in a photographic installation created by artist Jo Meisner. Placed within and among the actual surge of human movement, the glass wall comes to life. Reflected legs merge with the strides and steps of people coming and going. It is at once integrated and illusory. The work melds, almost but not quite fusing with the world it depicts. And it is those parts that don’t quite fit which make it such an intriguing, uncanny experience.
The relentless, restless movement of people outside the building is repeated inside the building by the work, Alone Together: In the company of strangers. Consisting of a strip of photographically printed transparencies, located on a waist-height horizon line, the imagery is of truncated bodies. Legs stride, feet hit the pavement and colour is bleached away in a frozen moment. Read literally as an urban street scene it conveys (but cropped to a lower register only) the repetition, monotony and movement of commuting much in the vein of that iconic John Brack painting, Collins Street, 5pm.[i] Yet on closer inspection the images have been photographed in situ – according to Jo, just days before, so that at any moment the owner of the depicted legs could walk into and through the image in a strange conflation of time, object and subject. This brings the work to immediate, vivacious life. Wrapped on the inside of these public-facing windows then, is an inward-looking idea; that of the self within the