The Adelaide Festival of Arts was on whilst I was a phototrip in Tasmania. The visual art highlight was Parallel Collisions at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

This presentation of contemporary Australian art included the work of Pat Brassington who also featured in the Hits and Memories: ten years at the Academy Gallery exhibition at the School of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Tasmania.

The images are offsetting or off centre in such a way that they disturb and create unease--they are part of a postmodern culture in that they deconstructed notions of the original and authenticity, interrogated the epistemology of the gaze and the stereotypes of feminine sexuality.

It is the psychoanalytic world of the uncanny that we have entered into but one viewed through surrealism. Ane Marsh in A Surrealist Impulse in Contemporary Australian Photography in Papers of Surrealism Issue 6 Autumn 2007 puts it thus:

Freud’s notion of the uncanny is exploited in much of Brassington’s imagery,as here what is homely and familiar becomes unhomely, unfamiliar, strange. The uncanny haunts the everyday and is sometimes experienced as a sense of unease, a kind of déjà-vu when we sense that we have seen this or been here before. This feeling of history repeating itself is intimately tied up with imaginary/psychic memory which is incomplete and fragmented, full of lost images and repressed fears. This kind of imagery circulates in the cultural imaginary and comes alive in art, literature and film. Brassington operates as a kind of archaeologist of the uncanny, picking over the ruins of conscious life and lived experience to find something beneath the surface which excites fear.