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Patricia Piccinini's work is not just another sampler of the art and technology fad currently doing the rounds in Australian art, nor is her use of digital computer imagery primarily concerned with a social critique of late capitalism. Rather, her work is preoccupied with exploring the relationship between contemporary consciousness and the visual rhetorics of advertising. Specifically, her images provoke questions concerning the psychology of the Lacanian consciousness in relation to the fantasised 'objet petit a' and the idealised egoic self. Her mimicry of the fetishised quality of advertising images provides insight into their ability to serve as objects of desire and paradigms of identity.
Piccinini's recent digital images include a range of works 'starring' Sophie Lee, the television icon of adolescent seduction. Lee plays a series of roles, or rather feminine stereotypes, appropriated from the stock of advertising tropes-enchanted nymph, contented mum, seductive vamp. In some pictures Lee cradles or yearns for the artist's LUMP infant, which functions as a futuristic and fetishised commodity object. These photographs of Lee are transposed on to virtually real digitally produced backgrounds which consist of abundant flowers which appear to be plastic, shiny, and clean. This generates an ambience which is sweet and delightful, and is indicative of the charming appeal of the cute advertising image, which is fundamentally gormless yet nevertheless contributes to the proliferation of the absorbing auratic spectacles which feature in much of the advertising that exists in contemporary culture.
But, what is the nature of this auratic appeal, this attraction? it seems more than coincidental that Piccinini's childlike images resemble naive toylands. They are like a magical mirage which promises a glittering and all-consuming narcissism. In this sense, they