Pat Brassington
A Rebours
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art: August 11- September 23, 2012
Joris-Karl Huysman’s 1884 novel A Rebours caused a scandal with its
anti-hero and his dedication to a decadent lifestyle. The novel became associated with the
Symbolist movement in Belle Epoque Paris. ‘A Rebours’ translates into English
as ‘against nature’, and it is this unnatural element in Pat Brassington’s
current exhibition at ACCA that makes it uneasy yet compelling viewing.
There is nothing overtly horrific
in Brassington’s work, yet a feeling of unease & horror pervades the
exhibition, which is 30 year retrospective. The curators have eschewed a
chronological hang, going for something far more moody. The tone of the
exhibition is set with the multi piece Cumulus Analysis (1986-87) in which 18
silver gelatin prints are hung in a grid like pattern. Like a collection of
film stills, the individual elements of clouds, statues, tensed hands, a fish,
cropped faces, fragments of bodies, all observed by the watchful eyes of a
woman, suggest a larger story.
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Brassington is a photographer who
works in both digital and analogue. Her photographs are predominantly black and
white, with some washes of muted colour. These photographs have soft edges and
blurred tones rather than the clinical sharpness that often characterizes
digital imagery. Soft and faded reds and blues create areas of tension in the otherwise
monochrome images. In early analogue photographs Brassington hand coloured her
printed images using food colouring dyes. More recent digital images are
manipulated on the computer to include soft areas of colour.
Brassington focuses on images of
the human body showing us extreme close-ups of faces with protruding tongues,
necks with strange gashes in them, a woman whose head has been replaced with
that of a child’s doll, a doll whose head has been replaced with a lightbulb.
The protruding tongue in Bloom (2003)
could be stained from raspberry ice-blocks or something more sinister
altogether. Red bubbles emerge from a
mouth in Font (2007), and red lace
obscures yet another mouth in Forget Your Perfect Offering (2008).These
are images that are uncanny, familiar and yet unsettling. Empty rooms,
with mid century period furniture, in the Cambridge Road series, made me think of film noir and crime scene
photographs. Just what had happened in that motel room? And why was a pair of
legs sticking out from underneath a coffee table? In Untitled (triptych) 1989, a trio of large photographs showed a
woman in old fashioned dress, a palm tree swaying in the wind and a naked young
girl, whose hands obscure her face. Undeniably a story, but what story? It’s ‘Wuthering Heights
Elizabeth Little has a B. Art Theory (Hons)and M Art Admin, COFA UNSW. She lives and works in Sydney.
All images supplied by the writer.
All images supplied by the writer.
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