RES Features: RES 10
Patricia Piccinini
Words: Alexie Glass
Suggesting a confluence of provocative naiveté, video arcades, fiction and science, Australian media artist Patricia Piccinini's works carry such names as Truck Babies and Psychogeography. The themes examined are Big Ones, including bioethics, biotechnologies, contemporary ideas of nature, the divide separating the natural and artificial, pseudo-eugenics, consumerism and car culture. Or as the Sierra Leone-born Piccinini succinctly says, her work is "about compromises -- about being able to find beauty in a world which can never be perfect."
Making work that speaks from the heart even as it examines issues that often seem only to have the most cursory acquaintance with feelings, Piccinini's project is -- in a sense -- about a transformation of the world. It grapples with an almost mythical transformation of a reality grounded in the artificial, a world where lives are not independent of technology. And despite some disturbing Frankensteinian consequences or "compromised" outcomes (think here of the premature aging of Dolly the sheep, creepy cults and their cloned babies or fetid laboratory mice sprouting human ears), Piccinini wouldn't want them to be. "The opposition of nature to technology is, to me, increasingly irrelevant," she explains. "I have an ambivalent attitude towards both technology and nature. They are both forces too massive to be either good or bad; I am interested in bringing the dark forces to light without denying the allure that I find there."
And the allure is contagious. Deploying a multitude of media to meet her creative ends -- sculpture, video, sound, digital photography and installation -- Piccinini makes work that is beautifully resolved and seamlessly finished. Truck Babies is an open road-inspired face off between sculpture and video. Psychogeography and Plasticology are photographs and installations respectively that synthesize new extremes of techno-landscape imaginings, while Still Life With Stem Cells and Game Boys Advanced play games with pseudo-eugenics. Sandman, a recent installation at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, offers an extraordinary confluence of large-scale, immersive video projection, photography and sculpture documenting the fictional journey of a "girl with gills" back to the ocean. Traveling in a yellow-paneled van emblazoned with the phrase "Xanadu," the photographs in the piece fuse mockumentary imagery with fashion editorial perfection, while the sculpture is an abject rendering of van culture and the film is pure, oceanic saturation.
Since graduating from art school in 1991, Piccinini has quickly become known as one of Australia's leading contemporary art practitioners, a fact that her impressive exhibition history confirms. Look for Sandman at this year's prestigious Venice Biennale.
