Fresh Cut 2007

Fresh Cut 2007

10 February–31 March 200710 Feb–31 Mar 2007

Fresh Cut is our annual emerging artists exhibition with artists selected from student exhibitions at Queensland art schools. This year’s Fresh Cut is a focussed show, with just five artists. Photographer Iselin Stensrud’s young sitters seem perfectly doll-like, with their mask-like faces and their generic clothes and settings suggesting Stepford-style modern perfection and alienation. Does her work critique plastic advertising imagery or exemplify it? Marianne Templeton’s slacker graphics make visual and textual jokes. Her screensaver-like video Eye Sucker is a looping animation of mindless, frenetic, attention-seeking scribble. For her video Only You Know, Chie Yamada superimposes love-letter sentiments over blurry self images in extreme close-up, suggesting an excessive intimacy. The work is seemingly addressed to the viewer: any viewer. Should we take it personally? Jennie Jackson notes that women’s fashion has long exploited a dialectic of concealing and revealing the body. Her surrealist-informed paintings of historical women’s garments suggest creatures, seeds and genitalia: it’s feminism in dialogue with fetishism. For our show, she creates a Rorschaching wallpaper work. Finally, Daniel McKewen slows down a Neutrogena television ad starring Mischa Barton, uncannily morphing the transitions between frames. If the highly produced ad sought to evoke natural beauty, McKewen’s detourned version suggests anything but: the natural has become robotic, the seductive demonic.

Artists

Iselin Stensrud, Marianne Templeton, Chie Yamada, Jennie Jackson, Daniel McKewen