Patricia Piccinini–In Another Life
Patricia Piccinini—In Another Life
19 February - 11 June 2006
Principal Sponsor 
Podcast: www.citygallery.org.nz/piccinini/
Patricia Piccinini is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, internationally renowned for her provocative yet deeply considered practice. City Gallery Wellington is excited to be mounting Piccinini’s first solo exhibition in New Zealand as part of the International Arts Festival. Piccinini’s work examines relationships between humans, animals and machines, between the natural and the artificial. Asking the viewer to consider how each of these categories is shaped, Piccinini investigates areas of slippage and cross-over between them.
This exhibition at City Gallery Wellington is a challenging, often dead-pan, look at the tangle of questions that surround genetics and biodiversity, and the interface between science and fantasy. Encompassing sculpture, photographs and video, the show includes Piccinini’s major new body of work ‘Nature’s Little Helpers’ 2005; the video work When my baby (when my baby); two sculptures (Cyclepups 2005 and Truck Babies 1999) which playfully propose a stage of infancy for machines; plus a hybrid tyre/creature Radial, 2005 and the major work The Young Family 2002-2003, which was part of Piccinini’s presentation at the Venice Biennale in 2003.
Piccinini’s work creates environments that are, at first glance, deceptively ‘normal’ and commonplace. But these seemingly familiar worlds are quickly disrupted by the intrusion of strange or grotesque creatures. The hyper-realism of Piccinini’s sculptural figures is one of their most attractive qualities, drawing the viewer into an unsettling pseudo-reality. The forms of the sculptures lead into a wide world of popular fantasy, make-believe and horror.
In the sculptures and photographs that form the series ‘Nature’s Little Helpers’, Piccinini addresses the topical issue of genetic engineering. These works tease out the complex of motivations and interests that surround human interventions in the natural environment. As she states, ‘Nature’s Little Helpers’ is ‘about doing the right things for the wrong reasons’. In these works we are presented with scenes of suburban/rural fringe banality – the building site, the Speedway, a freshly ploughed subdivision; sites where inter-species cohabitation can be fraught with tension and conflicting needs.
Truck Babies, Cyclepups and When my baby (when my baby) pick up on some of the questions raised by ‘Nature’s Little Helpers’. The video work When my baby (when my baby) pans across the surface of a hairy, fleshy, organic mass, picking out shapes that resemble facial features from within the swelling, breathing block of flesh. The work seems as if it should be recognisable and definable, but is strangely impossible to place. In Truck Babies, Piccinini creates perfectly-formed offspring for massive transport trucks. As she says of this work: ‘It asks questions about the nature of contemporary society—and the increasingly strange relationship between what we see as the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’. It asks whether we can any longer simply draw a line separating animals and machines, and where we stand in between the two’. With Cyclepups this relationship is even more difficult to define as these infant motorcycles have a partially formed, pupae-like appearance. It is the leather saddle and iridescent metallic paint finish that gives us the clearest an indication of what they will ‘grow-up’ to become.