Priscilla Bracks

Before completing a first class honours degree in Photography at the Queensland College of Art in 2002, Priscilla Bracks studied and practiced law in Australia. This multifaceted professional background sparked her interest in the interplay between human nature, social justice, law, media and pressing contemporary issues, which she actively explores through her art. Priscilla works within a broad range of mediums including photography, illustration, installation and new-media art.


In her latest body of work, Making the Empire Cross, Priscilla’s lenticular images bring together a heady masala of colour, contemporary socio-political events, religious mythologies, and popular literature, entertainment, and infotainment. These images draw on animated comic pop art and styles to examine the influence of contemporary mass media and popular culture in shaping identity, belief, history, and truth.


Use of super-saturated colour and parodist humour barely masks the works’ more serious themes. An increasing trend towards palatable news and infotainment make these works oddly familiar, yet fundamentally unsettling: drawing attention to the increasing sophistication of contemporary propaganda, where the lines between psychology, marketing, governance, entertainment, fact and fiction, are often blurred.


The lenticular medium itself plays an integral role in the work's discussion about the need to view our information streams critically. Lenticular images are actually comprised of two different images that have been interlaced and covered with a plastic lens. The lens enables each image to be seen separately, but only if one walks around the image to see it at varying perspectives. To see the entire picture, one must literally look at it from many different points of view.


Priscilla has won several awards, including the Courier Mail Emerging Artist Award in 2001, and has exhibited in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Dubai, St Tropez and Lille.


www.priscillabracks.com.au

www.making-the-empire-cross.com/

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