Pat Brassington: the body electric

By MiNDFOOD

Pat Brassington: the body electric

Left to right: Pat Brassington Candie and The permissions #3 from the series Quill 2013, Art Gallery of New South Wales © Pat Brassington

PAT BRASSINGTON EXHIBITION AT THE ART GALLERY OF NSW
Pat Brassington is one of Australia’s most important and influential contemporary photo-media artists. Drawn entirely from the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s collection and featuring work that spans her career to date, this exhibition focuses on Brassington’s depiction of the body and her ability to cultivate suspense and unease.

Since the mid-1980s, Brassington has produced photographic work that conjures worlds in which the fantastic infiltrates the familiar. The figures that populate her images, many of them distorted, however subtly, through digital manipulation, confound our expectations of anatomy. With pliable and elastic physiques, these bodies are at once intimate and alien.

While she crafts fictional scenes inhabited by imaginary protagonists, Brassington leaves very few clues through which to decode the narrative context of her work. Brassington’s photographic images resist interpretation and analysis. Rather than suggesting complete narrative arcs, they are episodic and fragmentary and, as such, resemble singular poetic stanzas.

Exhibition curator Isobel Parker Philip said Pat Brassington: the body electric acknowledges the relationship between Brassington’s practice and poetic form, as well as the indirect influence poetry has had on her work.

Pat Brassington:
the body electric

Free admission | Photography gallery, AGNSW

Until 11 February 2018

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