3 – 27 April 0024
Despard Gallery is proud to host Personae, solo exhibition by early career contemporary artist Micheila Petersfield.
In her first exhibition working exclusively in paint, Petersfield translates her highly distinctive photographic style to canvas. Through this shift in medium, Petersfield expands on the vernacular of self-imaging and the role of portraiture within a growing visual economy. Central to Petersfield’s practice is the critique of how women are portrayed in popular media, creating subversive interpretations that subtly parody familiar feminine tropes and its idealised aesthetics. This includes borrowing from the exaggerated aesthetics synonymous with cinema and women’s magazines from the 1960s and 1970s, reimagining their seductive visual qualities through glossy surfaces and hyper-realistic saturation.
Meticulously rendered, each painting is characterised by its flawless finish, amplifying its superficial appearance and camp performative qualities, their large-scale and cropped compositions enhancing their visual impact. As such, painting allows Petersfield to emphasise how colour, surface and augmented realism functions to seduce the viewer.
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