Having recently returned from a prestigious artist’s residency in Switzerland with an extended stopover in Asia on the way home, Heather Straka is set to open two new groundbreaking exhibitions, running concurrently in the heart of the Capital.
Having recently returned from a prestigious artist’s residency in Switzerland with an extended stopover in Asia on the way home, Heather Straka is set to open two new groundbreaking exhibitions, running concurrently in the heart of the Capital.
Straka will be at Wellington’s Page Blackie Gallery on 30 March to unveil her new exhibitions, entitled The Attendants and Do Not Resuscitate.
The Attendants builds on Straka’s earlier work, of idealised, glamorous, culturally ambiguous women (Pacific, Maori, Asian). This time the artist has dressed the girls in ‘attendant’ uniforms, referencing the vast number of young women in Japan who are employed to assist your every shopping need, from clothing to dining. The models in Straka’s immaculate portraits wear uniforms from a range of fast food outlets and sport either 1950s coiffured hairstyles or contemporary teenage cuts, highlighting the generations of this traditional servitude.
Straka’s other exhibition at Page Blackie Gallery, Do Not Resuscitate, uses photography to capture similarly glamorous Asian models, now recast in a morgue setting. Five Asian models wearing a variation of a Krispy Kreme Donut uniform casually smoke cigarettes around a Caucasian cadaver in a sterile morgue. This painfully beautiful scene references Rembrandt’s Doctor Nicolaes Tulp's Demonstration of the Anatomy of the Arm, from 1632, where medical professionals enthusiastically examine a cadaver. In Straka’s version, the ‘examiners’ are distracted, looking more like Japanese teenagers loitering on a street corner, than employed morgue attendants. Straka’s brilliance shines through in her ability to hold the modern audience’s attention in front of the sumptuously rich photographs, despite the stomach-churning combination of fast food and smoking in a sterile morgue.
Straka started her career as a painter while living in France in the late Nineties. Her whirlwind career has seen her win entries to national art competitions, exhibit both nationally and internationally and she was artist in residence as the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago in 2008. Most recently Straka has created a large touring exhibition kicking off soon at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
The Attendants and Do Not Resuscitate, by Heather Straka.
30 March – 24 April, 2010
Page Blackie Gallery, 42 Victoria Street, Wellington.