From Andrew Frost…
The title of Pat Brassington’s career survey exhibition A Rebours translates roughly as “against nature”. While many regard the photograph as truthful artists such as Brassington have long recognised the medium for what it is, a tool for creating tales that tell the truth by lying. The artist has repeatedly returned to the uncanny as the driver of her most powerful images. While the dark and moody pictures share something of the anti-naturalist aesthetic of her peers, Brassington’s work has always been compelling for its unadorned and seemingly casual nature, almost as if snapshots had been taken during some strange goings on in remote fibro lounge rooms.
Curated for ACCA by its director Julianna Engberg, A Rebours makes its Sydney debut at the ACP. Looking across the work the viewer is struck by Brassington’s adherence to a psychoanalytic/surrealist aesthetic, with strange juxtapositions and dramatic framing recurring motifs. Works such as her signature image Bloom from 2003, is echoed in the bubble-mouthed Font [2007] while images such as Radar [2010], of a figure bizarrely adjoined to a light switch, has the same collage magic of The Secret [2010].
Until August 18
Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington
Pic: Pat Brassington,The Secret, 2010. Courtesy Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, Stills Gallery. Sydney.
