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Stannage's art poses privacy questions

Miriam Stannage puts the focus on surveillance and secrecy. Picture by Iain Gillespie/WA News

When her house was burgled 18 months ago, artist Miriam Stannage says, on reflection, it fitted her artistic agenda quite nicely.

Transposing her life into art, she dutifully photographed the broken window as the potential seed for a new series, and busied herself adding fake security cameras to found artworks.

"I seem to have gone on this mad trail, doing all sort of things to do with security," she confesses.

A selection of these recent works is on show in Sentinel eye/spy at Art Collective WA, a group exhibition joining the artist with non-artists by including photographs by Perth-based activist Zebedee Parkes and private investigator Pete Andrea.

Curator Lee Kinsella says the exhibition explores how all three use a camera in different ways.

"Zebedee is right in the thick of the action as both an activist and filmmaker," Kinsella says. "As a private investigator, Pete takes his photographs by stealth, remaining unobtrusive. As an artist, Miriam investigates the power structures inherent in looking, her sophisticated, complex work inviting us to consider our position on our right to privacy."

With more than 200 surveillance cameras operating around the clock in the City of Perth, the exhibition may appear to exploit the topical but Stannage has long investigated the act of looking.

"My career has to do with sight and observing," she says. "My work questions what we see but also suggests what we can't see."

Her fake security cameras nod and flash, attached to photographs printed on canvas depicting locations the world over, including the London Underground, and innocuous cafes and back streets. "People will say they've seen the images before but think about what has happened in cafes, and what has happened in the Underground," she suggests.

Mystery and dramatic tension pervade an eight-minute video titled The White House, taken inside a derelict workers' cottage in the Murchison region of WA. Stannage pans the remains of life in the building, including packet meals still in the freezer, and crockery, cutlery and objects long abandoned. On top of a lovingly crocheted tablecloth sits a menacing chainsaw. Unexpectedly, several red handprints on a wall come in to view.

"It's just red-dirt hand marks," she says, settling my concern. "The whole thing is very suggestive of what might have happened there."

A lighter work in the exhibition takes the form of a black birdcage on a stand, replete with red and yellow perches, a blue birdfeeder and a mirror. A security camera peers out from inside. She calls it Mondrian's birdcage with security camera, alluding to the colours Mondrian favoured.

Stannage is one of Australia's most significant artists. Born in Northam in 1939, her work is represented in more than 35 public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of NSW and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Two major surveys of her work have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of WA in 1989 and John Curtin Gallery in 2006. A survey of the past 10 years is planned at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at UWA in 2016.

She agrees Sentinel eye/spy is very much a preview to her show next year. “I’m looking forward to the UWA exhibition because it’s a good space, and I can l put huge works up there. I suppose I do make life difficult for everyone - I’d be alright if I’d stuck to painting, but there’s printmaking, video and photography.”

Now 76, does Stannage ever contemplate letting art take a back seat in her life? "Unless I have some serious medical problem, I can't see myself stopping, and I'm never short of ideas," she says.

Sentinel eye/spy is on show at Art Collective WA, 115 Hay Street, Subiaco, until April 19.