The Samstag Alumni

The 2003 Anne & Gordon Samstag
International Visual Arts Scholarships

Rebecca Ann Hobbs | Anke Kindle | Maria Kontis | John Meade | Callum Morton | Simon Pericich | Samantha Small |

The photographs of Rebecca Ann Hobbs have borders with the unknown and the unsaid. Suck Roar (2001) is a series of seven self-portraits in which Hobbs pictures herself with a range of creatures from different species. The photographs have been digitally manipulated to intensify their color thus imitating the hand-colouring of another era. Each highly staged photograph sets up a relationship and suggests some communication between a human and another species - birds, possums, a dog, a squid, a stuffed fox, snails and a spider. The relationships become increasingly strange and attenuated.

Hobbs began the series planning to picture herself as a homeless person, but the imagery of cross-species relationships took over with all its metaphoric potential of investigating and depicting hierarchies of eroticism and power. In each photograph Hobbs appears in the centre wearing carefully chosen old clothes with a certain stylish awkwardness. It is almost as if she has restaged documentary photographs of an isolated weird scientist in the fifties or earlier, caught on a Freudian threshold of misunderstanding.

Stephanie Radok
from her Samstag catalogue essay;
The Point of Knowing

• The Samstag Alumni

Complex Social Groups 2001
digital inkjet print
95 x 80 cm
© the artist

Flight Using the Mouth 2001
digital inkjet print
95 x 80 cm
© the artist