Vault explores Pat Brassington's gutsy work in this photo essay.
"Mundane activities take on unsettling overtones and domestic environs are rendered strangely ominous as disembodied protagonists engage in sometimes confronting or irrational scenarios."
Grab issue 47 here >
Join us for a special event celebrating the current exhibition of renowned contemporary artist Pat Brassington. Rex Butler will provide a brief presentation on Brassington’s work, asking, how might we think of her work in relation to Man Ray's Le violon d'Ingres (1924), for example, which was made exactly 100 years ago? Following this, there will be a conversation with writer and curator Chelsea Hopper, moderated by art historian Victoria Perin.
CONVERSATION ON PAT BRASSINGTON
📅 Saturday, 20 July 2024, 3–4.30 PM
📍ARC ONE Gallery, 45 Flinders Ln, NAARM/MELBOURNE
IMAGE: Pat Brassington, Combed, 2020, Pigment print, 75 x 75 cm
Skewed body parts; allusions to genitalia, sex and violence; tinges of the fleshiest pink; a girl with a lightbulb for a head. Since the 1980s Pat Brassington’s images have entranced the psyche of contemporary Australian art. The photo-media artist’s staged, crafted scenes evoke something complicated, quietened, even repressed, in human nature, with her works often linked to psychoanalysis, feminism and surrealism.
Pat Brassington talks with Art Guide editor-in-chief Tiarney Miekus about first studying art in her thirties, and her early encounters with feminist texts through a wives’ book club. She also talks about her feelings on living and working in Hobart, the role of psychoanalysis in explaining her work, and what it means to mine the unconscious.
You can read the full interview with Tiarney Miekus here.
IMAGE: Pat Brassington, 'Pearl' (detail), 2016, pigment print, 80 x 68cm, Edition of 8 plus 2 artist's proofs.
In the Arms of Unconsciousness: Women, Feminism & the Surreal features a selection of works including Pat Brassington, Julie Rrap, Honey Long & Prue Stent, among other significant contemporary Australian artists on display at Hazelhurst Arts Centre from 1 July 2023 to 10 September 2023.
Sitting within a renewed global interest in women artists and Surrealism, this ambitious exhibition explores ideas of feminism and the surreal, proposing an intrinsic between the two, particularly in contemporary Australian art practice over the decades.
Installation view of a selection of works by Pat Brassington, In the arms of unconsciousness: Women, feminism and the surreal, Hazelhurst Arts Centre
Pat Brassington, Parachute, (detail) 2005, pigment print, 82 x 62cm, Purchased 2018, 2018.035, Wollongong Art Gallery.
"PAT BRASSINGTON, in 'Parachute', 2005, deploys pink like a narcotic, using it to wash her strange scene in a dreamy and unsettling light." Jane O'Sullivan writing for ART GUIDE.
This is the last week to see Brassington, alongside Jacky Redgate, John Brack, David McDiarmid and more in THINKING THROUGH PINK at the Wollongong Art Gallery, guest curated by Sally Grey.
PAT BRASSINGTON, Untitled #13, from Cambridge Road, 2007, Pigment Print, Edition of 8 + 2 A/P, 45.5 x 32.5 cm.
“What is the price of living in the ways we do? What do we value, and who decides? How do we make livings and meanings that get in the way of flourishing? And who gets to define what flourishing means?
The Cost of Living floats these questions through art works on various themes such as: the lure and limits of aspirational romance, social and emotional dislocation, toxic living environments, police violence, the ravages of war and the impact of social media.”
Robert Cook - AGWA Curator of Western Australian and Australian Art
Exhibition continues until January 29, 2023.
Welcome to ARC ONE at SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY
From today will be showing a selection of major artworks from some of Australia's most significant contemporary practitioners, including PAT BRASSINGTON, LYNDELL BROWN / CHARLES GREEN, PETER DAVERINGTON, MURRAY FREDERICKS, JANET LAURENCE, HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT, DANI MARTI, JULIE RRAP, IMANTS TILLERS, GUAN WEI, CATHERINE WOO, and JOHN YOUNG. We are also proud to be presenting, for the first time, the work of internationally acclaimed artist DESMOND LAZARO.
Our booth is showcasing brand new artworks, alongside some of the most iconic works from ARC ONE Gallery, in celebration of these artists and their significant contribution to contemporary art in this country.
Pat Brassington, The Long Goodbye, 2017, 90 x 72 cm, Pigment print.
Installation view of PAT BRASSINGTON’s work as viewed by ARC ONE Gallery Director Fran Clark recently at AGSA.
BRASSINGTON’S ‘The Long Goodbye’ now part of the Art Gallery of South Australia’s collection, has been curated by Director Rhana Devenport, into the extraordinary exhibition 'Robert Wilson: Moving portraits'.
The exhibition presents a series of video portraits of international celebrities, artists, ordinary people and animals, created by the New York artist, designer and director.
IMAGE: Anne Zahalka, The Cook (Michael Schmidt/architect) from the series Resemblance, 1986, matt Cibachrome paper, unique larger size, 100 x 100cm.
Six of our artists ANNE ZAHALKA, PAT BRASSINGTON, JULIE RRAP, JACKY REDGATE, JUSTINE KHAMARA and JOHN YOUNG feature in Daniel Palmer and Martyn Jolly's publication 'Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848-2020)', published by Perimeter Books and designed by Public Office.
"Installation View offers a significant new account of photography in Australia, told through its most important exhibitions and models of collection and display. By looking at what lies beyond the frame the exhibition speaks not only to pictures, but to the people and places that nurture them."
Find more information about the book here
Anne Marsh, ‘Doing Feminism: Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia’, published on 2 November, 2021, by The Miegunyah Press.
Five of ARC ONE artists – ANNE ZAHALKA, EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS, PAT BRASSINGTON, JULIE RRAP and JACKY REDGATE are featured in the newly published ‘Doing Feminism: Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia’.
Providing a comprehensive analysis of women’s art movements in Australia from the 1960s onward, this remarkable book by art historian Anne Marsh chronicles the struggles, contestations and achievements of women and feminism in Australian visual arts history. The book also acts as an divergent investigation into how the “doing” of feminism has shaped contemporary art and culture at home and abroad.
“…art and feminism are cyclical; they spiral in and out of time, and it’s interesting to see these younger women, very schooled in theoretical frameworks, turning back to an earlier time, and asking: why aren’t we doing that anymore?” ——Anne Marsh in conversation with Susanna Ling.
PAT BRASSINGTON’s work has been written on as part of Queer Readings of the Monash University Collection. For this project, a group of writers and artists have been invited to contextualise a selection of works of art through the lenses of their experience and knowledge.
Commissioned writer Anne Marsh says of Pat Brassinton’s work:
‘Formally, the work critiques the modernist grid by monumentalising the everyday and punctuating it with fetishist and abject references made-up in the viewer’s mind as they contemplate the soft material abstractions made out of discarded underwear. In this way Brassington gives the work its own potential intelligence. It is as if the viewer needs to have a visual conversation with the image in order to decode it.’
Anne Marsh is a Professional Research Fellow in the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne.
Pat Brassington, Rising Damp, 1995, gelatin silver prints, 35 parts, each 59 x 44 cm
PAT BRASSINGTON is featured in the 2021 Ballarat International Foto Biennale. The biennale’s core outdoor program invigorates the city of Ballarat by transforming busy streets, laneways, shopfronts and landmark buildings into exhibition spaces with public art.
Say it with Flowers is a site-responsive exhibition at Ballarat General Cemetery, curated by Wotjobaluk curator Kat Clarke. Responding to memory, mortality, longing and community, the exhibition is a meditation on the significance of flowers and land within the framework of nostalgia and memory.
Flowers represent a potent symbol of life and death, reminding one of both celebration and decay. While acknowledging the sensitive nature of the site, the exhibition aims to challenge the idea of the cemetery as a dormant space and demystify it as one for reflection and contemplation on the transience and impermanence of life.
BIFB continues until 24 October.
Pat Brassington’s Blush (2014) & Quiescent (2014) on display at the Ballarat General Cemetery in the exhibition Say it with Flowers, 2021.
PAT BRASSINGTON & JACKY REDGATE are included in the MGA Bowness Photography Prize Anniversary exhibition at Wangaratta Art Gallery, from 21 August – 14 November, 2021.
Curated by MGA Director Anouska Phizacklea, the exhibition celebrates the past winning artists (2006–20) with a selection of works drawn from the MGA Collection and showcases contemporary photography in Australia.
JACKY REDGATE won the Bowness Prize in 2011 with her work Light throw (mirrors) #4, 2011; and PAT BRASSINGTON in 2013 with her work Shadow boxer, 2013.
Jacky Redgate, Light throw (mirrors) #4, 2011, from the series Light throw (mirrors), 2009–2011, chromogenic print, 126 x 158 cm
Pat Brassington, Shadow boxer, 2013, from the series Quill, pigment ink-jet print, 72 x 50 cm
PAT BRASSINGTON is featured in Buxton Contemporary’s new exhibition This is a poem, curated by Melissa Keys.
Bringing contemporary art and poetry into dialogue, This is a poem is a multi-disciplinary project encompassing new commissions in a diverse mix of media and forms, live performances, a publication and an exhibition.
The project draws notable artists and poets into creative discourse. Each participant has been invited to write, perform, read or present in visual form an original work of poetry in response to an artwork held in the University’s Buxton Contemporary collection. In this case, choreographer/interdisciplinary artist Sandra Parker responds to Pat Brassington’s 1998 work, Neck.
Conceived to creatively animate the collection, This is a poem brings art, artists, and poetry into orbit with audiences through an experimental and experiential exhibition that explored the longstanding tradition of ekphrastic poetry.
Capacity limits are in place, so pre-book your visit to ensure there's room for you. The exhibition continues until 14 November.
More information >
Image 1: Pat Brassington, Neck, 1998, pigment print, 72 x 54cm; Image 2: Installation views of Sanda Parker's work alongside Pat Brassington's work, photos by Christian Capurro.
PAT BRASSINGTON has generously donated her work Fred to support the Ballarat International Foto Biennale. You now have the unique opportunity to purchase a limited edition work by the legendary Brassington, at a smaller size than her gallery works.
Fred is a wonderful expression of Brassington’s signature photo-media work. You can purchase this work via the BIFB website, with proceeds contributing to Ballartat Foto’s future and helping to support artists and champion photography as an art form in Australia.
Artwork details:
Pat Brassington,
Fred, 2014
Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 308gsm, 100% archival cotton rag
15.8cm x 18.3cm
Limited edition of 30
Pat Brassington is featured in The Work of Art, currently showing at artbank.
Curated by Sabrina Baker and Anja Loughhead as part of the Artbank Emerging Curator program, the exhibition brings together a selection of works from the Artbank collection that interrogate our relationship to art and traditional notions of labour.
Join Sabrina and Anja alongside artist Darcey Bella Arnold at 1pm on Saturday 22 May as they discuss the physical, conceptual, material and emotional exertion tied to creative production and the importance of placing value on the - work of art.
More information >
Jacky Redgate, Light Throw (Mirrors) #4, 2011, silver halide Chromogenic photograph handprinted, 126 x 158 cm
Pat Brassington, Shadow Boxer, pigment print, 72 x 50 cm
JACKY REDGATE & PAT BRASSINGTON have works on display at Smith & Singer on Collins Street for the next few weeks, as part of the MGA’s travelling exhibition Bowness Photography Prize Celebrates 15 Years.
In 2020 the Bowness Photography Prize marked its 15th year. To celebrate MGA has partnered with Smith & Singer to showcase the previous 15 recipients during the International Photo Festival. As the recipients of the 2011 and 2013 prizes respectively, Redgate and Brassington’s works are on view!
The Bowness Photography Prize has become an important survey of contemporary photographic practice and one of the most prestigious prizes in the country. The Prize reveals artists’ continued fascination with exploring and pushing the boundaries of the photographic medium, embracing its capacity to explore a diversity of voices and perspectives.
The exhibition will continue until 7 March.
One of Australia’s most significant and influential artists, Pat Brassington, returns to ARC ONE with Night Swimming, a new body of work presented as part of the PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography. An opening reception will be held on Friday 19 February, 6-8pm.
Pat Brassington’s work uncovers how the endless possibilities of our deep and complex inner states — narratives of sex, memory and identity — run quietly rampant.
Influenced by surrealism, feminism and psychoanalysis, Brassington is known for her ability to combine the ordinary with the unusual, making her work provocatively ambiguous.
Pat Brassington, Footloose, 2019, pigment print, edition of 6, 75 x 75 cm
In Night Swimming, she employs photomontage to reveal the power of the mind to transform mundane objects and situations into sites/sights of sensuality, desire, horror or menace. Baulking prior to resolution, Brassington leaves her work open to interpretation; allowing the viewers’ visual mind to make its own associations. Digitally manipulated and evocatively juxtaposed, bodily fragments, inky tones, fetish objects and claustrophobic interiors are rendered abject or sublime, unsettling or seductive by the viewer; exposing our innermost predilections, hopes, biases and fears.
Typical of the artist’s work, these monochromatic images bring together a series of fragments which
create a strange and ambiguous world.
Pat Brassington, Precious, 2019, pigment print, edition of 6, 75 x 75 cm
The parts of the images – a fish slipping down a throat, a jarring clash of sharp fingernails, heads which twist into a strange darkness and feet that curl – are drawn from Brassington’s vast archive of visual material and are deeply personal. These disjointed compositions offer contradictions between the soft charcoal tones of the pigment print, the intimacy of the forms and the unsettling charge of the juxtapositions. Night Swimming rouses a sense of disquiet as the images subtly and humorously scratch at the underbelly of the human condition.
PAT BRASSINGTON is featured in the exhibition Every Body, now showing at Wollongong Art Gallery.
This is an exhibition of works from the collection that explores narrative, mythological, historical and reflective depictions of the human body.
Three of Pat’s pink works from the early 2000’s are included. "It’s not my intention to feminise the image by using pink. It's 'nastier' than that. Pink smothers,” says the artist.
Every Body continues until July next year.
PAT BRASSINGTON & ANNE ZAHALKA are featured in Geelong Gallery’s new exhibition Framing the Figure - contemporary photography and moving image works from the collection.
This exhibition explores artists’ use of the camera to capture their human subjects in both still and moving images. Through performative gestures, constructed narratives or a focus on specific body parts, these lens-based artists work closely with their subjects to compose the figure within the camera’s frame.
Framing the figure opens today and continues until 25 April 2021. Book a free, timed-entry ticket ahead of your visit!
Pat Brassington, Akimbo, 1999, pigment print, 72 x 52 cm
