Project Room: This is not a Love Song – Pat Brassington

About the exhibition
This solo exhibition brought together a selection of photographs by Tasmanian artist Pat Brassington made between 1984 and 1995, to reveal the artist’s distinctive ability to transform the familiar into the uncanny and abject.

Unsettling in nature, the featured works were filled with visual ambiguities—blurring the boundaries between faces and body parts, limbs and strips of cloth, animal and human forms.

Writing for the exhibition catalogue, critic Edward Colless describes the unique quality of Brassington’s practice:

Brassington appropriates photographic images sometimes from major artists but more often than not from books of movie stills, or anonymous medical archives, or the natural history sections of encyclopedias. And even when she uses her own photographs they too appear to be ‘found images’, degraded by neglect or time and rediscovered because some quirky feature catches her eye. One could say that she even appropriates her own work, but again, that is not quite right. Whether she takes a new photograph or finds an old one, she seems equally remote and equally spellbound. She pieces these images together, regardless of their origin, into enigmatic emblems.

Acknowledgement
Project Room was a series of annual exhibitions held in the Russell Drysdale Gallery at the Monash University Gallery that began in 1995. It was intended to provide selected artists with the opportunity to exhibit new or recent work conceived for the space and realised in collaboration with the gallery staff.

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^{Image: Pat Brassington, Untitled III 1995, silver gelatin print, 71 x 118 cm. Courtesy of the artist}