21 October – 14 November 2026
Despard Gallery is placed to host special joint exhibition featuring the works of early career contemporary artists Micheila Petersfield and Philip James Mylecharane.
Micheila Petersfield is an early career artist based in Melbourne, Victoria. Through painting and photography, Petersfield expands on the vernacular of self-imaging and the role of contemporary portraiture. Central to Petersfield’s practice is the critique of how women are portrayed in popular media. Borrowing from the tailored aesthetics of fashion imagery, Petersfield creates subversive self-portraits that subtly parody familiar feminine tropes and its idealised aesthetics, using costumes, props and pose to adopt multiple personas.
Philip James Mylecharane is an early career artist living and working in Hobart, Tasmania. Mylecharane’s practice examines how paint can describe multifarious states of perception, including the entanglement of identity and inhabited space. Each figure is recognisable, yet remains ambiguous at the same time, where they appear to be either patched together in a state of repair or in a process of being torn apart. With a unique combination of representation and abstraction, each surface hosts a visual wrestle between order and disarray.