Cath Barcan Nature morte/Civil works
11 May – 23 June
Nature morte/Civil works explores the seductive and confounding use of plastic and its ubiquitous role in our daily life. Blue Mountains artist Cath Barcan uses still life and landscape photography to highlight the use of plastic packaging in food and its presence in the landscape. Barcan references still life painters of the Dutch Golden Age who created images that grappled with issues of mortality, permanence and death. Her still life photographs harness this familiar visual language to present paradoxical and conflicting relationships between life, death, stillness, urgency, beauty and time. Barcan’s landscape photographs depict wrapped and enclosed road construction sites and other civil works–staged as theatrical spaces, akin to still life sets and complete with drapery–which both reveal and conceal the complexity of what lies beneath.
A Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Exposé Program exhibition.
Image caption: CATH BARCAN Still life with shopping bags II from the series ‘Still Life’2016, archival inkjet pigment print, 88 x 61 cm
