Nature morte/Civil works at the Cultural Centre in Katoomba explores the seductive and confounding use of plastic and its ubiquitous role in our daily life.
Mountains artist Cath Barcan uses still life and landscape photography to highlight the use of plastic packaging in food and its presence in the landscape. Barcan references still life painters of the Dutch Golden Age who created images that grappled with issues of mortality, permanence and death.
Her still life photographs harness this familiar visual language to present paradoxical and conflicting relationships between life, death, stillness, urgency, beauty and time.
Barcan's landscape photographs depict wrapped and enclosed road construction sites and other civil works - staged as theatrical spaces, akin to still life sets and complete with drapery - which both reveal and conceal the complexity of what lies beneath.
She has been a finalist in major Australian art prizes including the Blake Prize for Religious Art and the National Photography Prize and was the recipient of the Premier's University of NSW Creative Arts Scholarship, for which she undertook post-graduate study at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2018.
This is the last chance to see this exhibition which closes on June 23.
At Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, Katoomba, 10am-5pm weekdays, 10am-4pm weekends. Admission free during the exhibition.