Library

  • Camera follows the children’s journey

    Alicia Wood, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 30 January 2011, p. 36

    THE transition between childhood and adolescence is a recurring theme in the photographs of Melbourne artist Polixeni Papapetrou. But that doesn't mean she takes her children's transition any easier than any other mother.

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  • Consequence of images

    Corrie Perkin, The Australian, Sydney, August 22, 2008, p. 10

    ONE Sunday morning last month, a culture war was declared on an unsuspecting Melbourne family. Artist and lawyer Polixeni Papapetrou and her husband Robert Nelson were woken up at 5.30am by a television producer seeking an interview to discuss the July issue of Art Monthly Australia magazine. The Sunday Telegraph had published a story that morning under the headline "Art mag's 'sick' nude child stunt" that referred to the cover image of a naked five-year-old girl.

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  • Protecting art for art’s sake

    Gerard Vaughan, Herald Sun, Melbourne, 8 July 2008, p.19

    The controversy surrounding Bill Henson's depiction of nude teenagers in his photographic art began as a reaction to the image of a 13-year-old printed on the invitation to his commercial exhibition at the Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery in Sydney. Within days - encouraged by the ill-judged comments of some senior public figures in NSW and the ACT - we observed the depressing spectacle of police raids on public galleries there, and the removal from public view of works by Bill Henson.

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  • ZOOM

    Cristina Franzoni, Milan, March/April 2008, pp. 26-31

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  • Vanishing into the landscape

    Adam Gifford, New Zealand Herald, Auckland, 23 August 2007, p. B5

    Polixeni Papapetrou shows several works from her Haunted Country series, which use stories of lost children to explore the relationship Australians have with their landscape.

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  • Mythology and fairytales reign

    Adam Gifford, New Zealand Herald, Auckland, 21 March 2007, p.B4

    Australian Polixeni Papapetrou has used the proto-surrealist Alice in Wonderland as the source for her large photographs, posing her daughter Olympia in front of trompe l'oeil backdrops painted by husband Robert Nelson to recreate the classic John Tenniel illustrations.

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  • Little and lost to the land

    Philippa Hawker, The Age, Melbourne, A2, 10 February, 2007, p. 19

    IN RECENT YEARS, Polixeni Papapetrou has been photographing childhood: its trappings and expectations, its meanings and its symbols. It is a many-layered, rich, ambiguous vision. Her images are stylised, carefully staged, heightened depictions: at their centre, for the most part, has been a particular child, her daughter, Olympia.

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  • Anglela Grossman’s and Polixeni Papapetrou’s Adventures in Wonderland

    Silvia Sorbelli, The Concordia Undergraduate Journal of Art History, Concordia University, Montreal, Issue 2, 2006, pp. 113-119

    The After Alice exhibition, on display at the Maison de la Culture in the Plateau Mont-Royal from September 2-25, 2005, presented Angela Grossmann’s photographic series, Alpha Girls (2004-5) and Psychological Alice (2003-4), and Polixeni Papapetrou’s series, Wonderland (2003-4) and Dreamchild (2002-3). Amid myriad representations of young girls, the theme of childhood innocence emerged through a controversial association with the works of Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll), the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

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  • Image and Imagination: Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal

    Anna Carlevaris, Magazine CIEL VARIABLE, Montreal, Issue 70, Winter 2006, pp. 35-36

    The subject of sexual violence underscores Deacon’s work and that of fellow Australian Tracey Moffatt in her exquisitely produced reveries of seduction. It is also in After Alice, a two-person show about children and predatory fantasy that includes the Australian Polixeni Papapetrou. The subject of sexual relations appears again most apparently in Karen Brett’s tightly framed, large-scale photographs of older couples’ blushing bodies, and even in Michael Snow’s colossal curtain-piece Powers of Two.

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  • The Line Between Us: The Maternal Relation in Contemporary Photography

    Melissa Miles, Eyeline Contemporary Visual Arts, Brisbane, No. 56, Summer 2004/05, pp. 50-51

    At a time when the mainstream media is constantly reminding us of the declining national birth rate and the increasingly cynical approach to motherhood that supposedly characterises 'women today', it is refreshing to see a more multifaceted and sophisticated account of the psychological and physical complexities that characterise the maternal relation. In a recent exhibition at the Monash University Museum of Art, 'The Line Between Us: The Maternal Relation in Contemporary Photography', such clichés and essentialist stereotypes about motherhood are eloquently refuted. Curated by Kyla McFarlane, this beautiful and often unsettling collection of photographs by Donna Bailey, Pat Brassington, Anne Ferran, Anne Noble and Polixeni Papapetrou speaks to the tense, intimate, emotional and highly negotiated relationships between mothers and their children.

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  • Strike a Pose

    Adrian Martin, Australian Art Collector, Sydney, Issue 28, April - June 2004, pp.102-106

    More than ever, contemporary photography in Australia (as in the rest of the world) is splitting starkly into two camps. On the one hand, there is documentary photography, bearing witness to the extremes of suburban grunge and the spontaneous effusions of daily life. And on the other hand, an extremely stylised type of photography which revels in artifice, in the constructed image.

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  • Photography’s phantasmagorias

    Marielle Juchau, Real Time, Sydney, June–July 03, No. 55, p. 14

    Also haunting and otherworldly but far less ethereally so, is Polixeni Papapetrou’s bold series Phantomwise at Stills Gallery. On first glance these one metre square, unframed prints, tacked poster-style on the walls, seem to depict lifeless dolls, in quaintly cliched scenarios. These character ‘types’: The Last Pharoah, Gatsby Girl, Pilgrim Quilting, Turkish Pasha, Gypsy Queen were inspired by a set of Victorian masks that Papapetrou purchased before the birth of her daughter, Olympia.

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