Not many people could get away with drawing an entire exhibition comprised exclusively of cats. That is, unless you are artist and self confessed 'cat lady', Anastasia Klose. Using her signature style of sardonic self-expression, Klose's latest body of work,
I Can't Stop Living, explores the relationship that we have with our pets, ourselves and the passing of time.
Furry faces pop out of hashed pencil drawings, shrouded in a cacophony of colour and movement. Each animal is distinctly different to the next, evoking a range of emotions from nostalgia to pity. Some of the images are representations of cats Anastasia Klose has owned in the past, segmenting and chronicling opposing periods in her life through animals.
Others are of Lost Cats found on the internet - pets that have been given a second life through adoption. As well as these new works, Klose has included a dozen cat drawings that have been salvaged from her childhood, proving that even at a young age, felines played a large role in her psyche. As in all of her work, these new drawings are humorous and candid in their willful admittance of life's sore spots.
I Can't Stop Living follows on from her recent solo show at Gertrude Contemporary, Fitzroy. While her previous videos, installation pieces and performances focus heavily on her self-deprecating nature and her voluntary approach to putting herself in embarrassing circumstances, Klose's third exhibition at Tolarno Galleries has a more positive edge. Instead of lamenting what she does not have, she is celebrating what she does.
"One day I woke up and I realised, ‘I can’t stop living’," Klose says of the relation between herself, her childhood cats and the exhibition. "You wake up, and it’s another day. You get up and make a cup of coffee. And then you get on the train and go to work. And you keep on living. Animals also can’t stop living. Many cats, for example, keep right on living after many bad things have happened to them. Sometimes they live in a cat shelter, sometimes they live on the streets and other times, they belong to someone cruel or neglectful."
The hyper-coloured drawings have all been created on the lounge room floor of Klose's house in northern Melbourne with a box of Derwent pencils that once belonged to an ex-housemate. Everybody at some point in their childhood has owned Derwents, often going unused and under loved. This lo-fi approach infuses much of her work across many mediums. The laborious act of taking days and piles of pencil shavings to create each work is enjoyed by Klose, who believes that the interaction with her art is as important as the product.
The drawings are accompanied by a homemade video that again fuses childhood memories from existing VHS tapes with freshly made performance pieces. It is a mix of pre-meditated and spontaneous actions, effectively creating a memoir of her life up until now.
Klose's work is exceedingly self-referential, using the raw emotions and experiences that she has had in her life and channeling them into her art. The result elicits a distinctive response in the viewer that sits between empathy and shock. What is seen on paper is the rawest version of Klose, unabashed and brutal.
In her video installation, she even bares herself so far to show a snippet of an amateur sex tape. Summarising her life into a short video and drawings of cats, I Can't Stop Living is a retrospective of Klose's growth as an adult and as an artist.
Press release courtesy Tolarno Galleries.