PAINTING & GRAPHICS - July 2007

Carla Priivald's new exhibition at Brenda May Gallery examines how we construct our identities and environments in the twenty-first century. She is concerned to highlight, through stencilled portraits of famous people, the way that celebrity identities, while being valued and desirable, are in fact banal and repeatable. "I ultimately selected the image for the deadpan, non-expressive features of the subject" she states. The images are largely taken from advertising media and, most importantly, the work is based on colour.

This use of colour ties in with themes previously explored, and expanded upon in this show, such as examining urban landscapes as sites of political and social dissent through the documentation of street art and graffiti. Priivald's work utilises photography and graphic art as well as drawing heavily on popular culture images that represent both the figure (identifiable or anonymous) and the urban landscape.

More recently Priivald has begun to explore the natural landscape and the intersections between it and her more familiar urban haunts. These new works merge factories and buildings with suggestions of trees and bushland within painterly backgrounds through a use of projected stencils. They are the largest paintings so far and are beginning to resemble the traits of more traditional landscape paintings with a delineated foreground, middle ground, background.

All of her art is united by the theme of construction. This extends to the construction of the work of art itself - a process that uniquely combines media resulting in photographically derived paintings. As Priivald states "I first construct a digital image" layered and created from a multitude of sources. Then she "re-creates it in paint".

Dr Anna Lawrenson - June 2007