Pat Brassington is one of Australia’s leading photographic artists. For three decades Brassington has developed a significant critical and popular reputation for her visually striking, highly ambiguous pictures. MGA holds a significant number of Brassington’s works, which are shown here alongside the artist’s new major work A heartbeat away.

A heartbeat away was commissioned for the major exhibition Parallel collisions held at Art Gallery of South Australia, part of the 2012 Adelaide Biennial. The work comprises 18 unframed pictures each of which shows an enigmatic figure or object occupying the corner of a stark domestic room. The rooms and their contents seem to repeat and distort like frames from a horror movie or fragments of a bad dream. In playing with what is familiar to us, and making it strange, the work plays with our desire to make sense of what we see. As the artist has written, ‘I aim to pitch my images just off the verge of normality, into those dense patches where the commonplace goes awry’.