After over ten years exhibiting in Melbourne and Sydney, Rebecca Hastings will exhibit for the first time at Praxis Artspace, Adelaide, with a survey of recent work.
Hastings’ practice engages with themes of the Post-human condition, reflecting and drawing on both personal and collective existential anxieties. Adopting the conventions of figurative and still life painting genres, Hastings’ Classically-rendered paintings merge uncanny and gothic tropes, with the everyday to convey otherworldly, surreal narratives. Within this exhibition Romanticism, hard-edge graphics and pop culture iconography heighten the temporal interplay that typifies Hastings’ work. These loaded yet obscure conflations, enable the work to hover within a psychological mindscape; an invocation of theUncanny Valley disturbingly poised between the real, and the unreal. By the time you read this we shall all be dead acknowledges the inexpressible fears of our time, playing out as memento mori for our planet, our innocence, and our humanity.
Rebecca Hastings is a South Australian artist working from her home studio in the Adelaide Hills. Hastings holds a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) and aMaster of Visual Art (Research).Awards and grants include Art SA Project grants, and a UniSA Graduate Research Travel and Research SupportScholarship enabling a research residency in Japan in 2017. Her work has been shortlisted for the BPPortrait Prize 2015 (National Portrait Gallery, London), and a Finalist in a range of significant art prizes, including the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize (2021), the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award(2012), the Sulman prize (2014 and 2015), and the Archibald prize (2014). Hastings has exhibited widely, with work held in collections nationally and internationally.
