Just So by Pat Brassington
One of Australia’s most highly respected and preeminent artists, Pat Brassington’s latest solo exhibition, Just So, takes its title from Rudyard Kipling’s famed Just So Stories, a collection of short and highly-fantasised tales on the origins of animal phenomena.
Trading wildlife for humans, Brassington describes her images as ‘fanciful depictions of human biological traits and behaviours that … feel to be just so’.Her visual fallacies unite the strange with the familiar, creating an ambiguity that causes our interpretations to falter.
Among the fifteen new works exhibited, images and motifs observed throughout the artist’s oeuvre resurface and present freshly precarious insinuations; tongues poke and mouths gape, a lonely fish stagnates in an indeterminate hollow, and a crimson pearl balances delicately at the apex of feminine thighs.
About Pat Brasington
With a career spanning more than three decades, Pat Brassington is one of Australia’s most significant and influential artists working in photo-media. She is recognised as a leading exponent of Australian contemporary art, and has developed a singular practice that draws on ideas from psychoanalysis, feminism and Surrealism, consistently producing visually- and psychologically intriguing work and enticing critics, curators and the public alike.
In 2013, Brassington won the prestigious Monash Gallery of Art Bowness Photography Prize. In 2012, she was honoured with a major nationally touring survey of her work, A Rebours, by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), which continues to tour in 2016.
Brassington’s work has also featured extensively in major exhibitions, including the Adelaide Biennial Parallel Collisions (2012); Feminism Never Happened at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2010); the Biennale of Sydney (2004); World Without End - Photography and the 20th Century at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2000) and Fotokunst Aus Australien, Berlin (2000), curated by Bernice Murphy.
