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The Sleeping Room: Heather Straka

4 April - 23 May 2009

Heather Straka, Human Tissue Manager, 2008, 990 x 800 mm, oil on cotton on board, Collection of the Artist, Dunedin.

Created during Heather Straka’s time as 2008 Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago, these paintings encourage us to look at the human body in new ways and to have empathy with the subjects that they depict.

Straka’s still life paintings of body parts, completed after several visits to the Dissecting Room at the Dunedin Medical School, are confronting because they speak directly of our own mortality. Looking at her images of the body’s interior encourages self-reflexivity in the same way that vanitas, a genre of seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting, provoke a contemplation of the transience of life. While viewing a dead body is commonly associated with feelings of unease and detachment, Straka’s images of death are strangely compelling. Viewing the cadaver at once remove, mediated by her artistic interpretation, the viewer becomes a complicit voyeur.

Heather Straka, Life Still No. 5, 2008, 440 x 585 mm, oil on cotton on board, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.

Other paintings in her Life Still series portray flowers or an artist model that Straka refers to as her ‘live body donor’. Brimming with visual puns, her depictions of the whole body or its parts reference past art styles and historical periods from the Renaissance and Romantic periods to Robert Mapplethorpe’s homo-erotic flower photographs of the 1980s. Straka’s practice of juxtaposing images of usually unrelated objects, such as an uncooked chicken wing and a nude model, creates an element of Surrealist surprise that alleviates any melancholic sentiment.

Human dissection and a knowledge of anatomy have been part of the training for artists and physicians since the Renaissance. Straka’s paintings of the human body draw our attention to the overlap between the roles of the artist and the anatomist. As with the anatomist, the methods of an artist are governed by existing codes. Like them Straka dissects or ‘cuts up’ the human form and rearranges it according to established conventions. Society deems both respected authorities with privileged positions of power that contrast markedly to the ‘powerlessness’ of the artist’s model or the cadaver.

By engaging the viewer’s emotion and eliciting reflection, Straka’s paintings make the viewer conscious of hierarchies of power and the act of looking.

Last revised: 1 April, 2009