Polixeni Papapetrou Eden and Beyond 2016
Eden and Beyond
The series Eden arose out of a project that had been commissioned by the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Melbourne in 2015. I was asked to create works in response to the Melbourne General Cemetery. I photographed flowers obtained from the cemetery against a black backdrop to invoke ideas about mourning and remembrance.… Continued
A Performative Paradox
Polixeni Papapetrou’s early experiments with photography fit into the documentary tradition but they also collide with the concept of the performative. In some respects this is driven by the subjects she choses to work with, especially the drag queens, circus personalities and Elvis impersonators she photographed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. All of these people are, one way or another, performing identities.… Continued
Polixeni Papapetrou flexes the camera’s hold on her subjects: her children, their friends and the Australian landscape. Whether embedded in rural settings, disguised by masks and costumes or embellished with accoutrements, she is a masterful narrator. These carefully arranged scenarios are tales without endings; stills from a lifelong inquiry into our relationship with each other, with ourselves and our context. Intimate and poignant, each vignette has a taut composition that tells stories of love and loss.… Continued
‘deep in the heart of…’
‘Under my skin’ represents a selection of work drawing on four photographic series by Polixeni Papapetrou, one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists who has been exhibiting her photography since 1986 to an ever-growing audience and critical acclaim. The selection focuses on Papapetrou’s ‘masked’ series, i.e., those series in which the human ‘actor’ or actors in her photographs literally wear a mask.… Continued
Songs for the end of rhapsody
The thoughts that thrill the mind are of their time
and don’t transcend the hour from which they sprang.
We dream of fixing moments, holding smoke
that streams between the fingers as we clutch:
the harder is our grip, the less we grasp,
the more we squeeze it out and end the space.
I think my thoughts stand tall, expand, transmit,
are in a thousand listening ears at once,
that beauty which is shared could range beyond
and spread its happy humours outward, onward,
yet buoyed by copious vanity: how it’s mocked
when future ears are deaf and eyes are blind
to all the witnesses of closed experience!… Continued
Melancholia
1.
Take a look at my face and examine the joy
that my costume expresses and actions employ.
I have trouble disguising my world-weary frown
which is etched in the mask of an obsolete clown.
My career was to laugh and encourage delight
by an abject grotesqueness that also brings fright.
I’m eternally twisted, distorted and morphed
with extravagant pride in what ought to be dwarfed;
I’m enormous and tiny, a knave beyond scale
who makes light of the tragic or sorrowful tale
but who then inexplicably waxes morose
when the story is happy or tender or close.… Continued