Clemenger Contemporary Art Award: Pat Brassington

Pat Brassington is Australia’s key surrealist working with photo media. For the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, she presents In marble halls, 2003, a series 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. In mixing past and present, analogue and digital images, the artist exploits the special connection to reality on which photography is based. The works hover in time and a nostalgically diffuse light as if caught in ambiguous dream logic.