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June 1, 2009
Pat Brassington is Australia’s key surrealist working with photo media. The series A little waltz consists of prints of a man (an atypical subject for the artist) who is nude and contorted in sometimes impossible gymnastic moves. The images are slightly blurred and at times reveal incongruous elements or improbable shadows.
Pat Brassington, In Marble Halls #1, 2003, from A little waltz, Pigment print
They are photos of rather small moments, small thoughts and unspoken feelings. In seemingly prosaic rooms, objects or actions become unsettling and ambiguous. Chris Drew in says in Islands (No 112, 2008 ) that Brassington's:
work conjures unnameable feelings and strange stirrings: ‘fragments of memory’, disturbing dream imagery, dis- and re-membered bodies, and strange erotic scenarios all claustrophobic and familial – both adult and childlike at once.
Many don’t look less like photographs and more like subtle, exquisite, finely wrought drawings and often we are placed in the position of a voyeur.
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