Patricia Piccinini: Once upon a time
The Art Gallery of South Australia's major exhibition for 2011, "Patricia Piccinini: Once upon a time"... presents a group of cautionary tales that span the artist’s staggering fifteen-year career to date. In the largest ever survey of her work, through more than sixty works in photography, moving image, sculpture, drawing and installation, Piccinini takes us into a world that is not so different from our own. She invites us to contemplate our place within a time - our time – when biological and digital technologies are challenging the boundaries of humanity. Piccinini’s practice has been described as transversing three orbits – the biosphere, the autosphere and the atmosphere – each of which in turn reflect her investigation of biotechnology, car culture and the construct of nature within contemporary society. The themes that inform her practice occur within these trajectories, becoming intertwined within a single text, which is ultimately a story about finding beauty in a world that can never be perfect.