In her work, Josephine Pryde explores and interrogates the creation and consumption of visual culture, with a specific focus on photography and its associated modes of production. Pryde challenges her chosen medium from both sides of the camera’s lens, employing – and often juxtaposing – a wide range of visual, thematic and compositional devices to create works that both recall and subvert readily available imagery, such as stock photography. In doing so, Pryde has created a body of work that simultaneously celebrates and manipulates image making and aesthetics. Her series of guinea pig portraits, ‘Scale’, are inspired by ‘cute pet photography’ but her choice of subject conjures associations with laboratory research. In the series ‘This Time Last Year’, Pryde disrupts prints of photographs that play on glossy fashion shots by inserting aluminium tubes that both puncture the image and heighten the work’s status as a physical object. ‘It’s Not My Body’ presents colourful Photoshop juxtapositions of MRI scans of the human foetus and macro-lens desert landscapes that are unnervingly loaded. Pryde’s ongoing series, ‘Hands “Für Mich”’, resemble lifestyle or advertising images; closely cropped and focused on the model’s upper body, their perfectly manicured fingers in contact with touch-sensitive elements such as such as tablet screens, a dimmable table lamp, and the human chest, drawing our attention to these tactile transitions and the connection between body and object. The outcome of Pryde’s most recent exploration exposes her perceptive, deliberate play on the mechanic and the organic, and the abstract and the representational; the ‘Cup and Ring’ series unites pre-historic symbols and signs, all dramatically framed, scaled and positioned, with familiar contemporary tools and devices, challenging the viewer’s understanding of symbolism and technology, while highlighting our deeply-engrained, and ever growing readiness to rely entirely upon mechanisation.
At times, Pryde’s visual language extends to sculptures and installations that, much like her photographs, quietly interrupt the viewer’s visual memory and viewing experience. Several exhibitions in recent years have included The New Media Express, a graffitied miniature locomotive train that visitors can ride as it moves along the tracks, creating a familiar and yet equally unique way to experience and interact with Pryde’s work in the gallery. These emblematic and oftentimes narrative, three-dimensional works extend Pryde’s ongoing exploration of the dynamics that play out between viewer, object, image and space.
Selected Works
Installation Views
Press
Exhibitions
