By Robert Leonard and Ann StephenJacky Redgate is regarded as one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, with over 35 years of continuous creation, exhibition and innovation. She is well known for her eminent minimalist-conceptual works based on systems and logic, but in recent work Redgate has teased audiences with a combination of photographic abstraction and an autobiographical mask of mirrors. Reinventing her oeuvre over the last two decades with a series of studio experiments engaging light and reftection, Redgate has produced a remarkable body of work charged with formal and conceptual intensity. Redgate’s mirror works, including a new project using found photographs, was exhibited at the University Art Gallery, the University of Sydney, to much acclaim in 2015 and this comprehensive publication unpacks the significance of this exciting new series for the very first time.For those who have followed Redgate’s work, this book will be a revelation, as essayist Robert Leonard explains:Jacky Redgate came into the (art) world as the confticted offspring of feminism on the one hand and minimalism and conceptualism on the other. Where minimalism and conceptualism resisted expressionism and suppressed psycho-biography, the women’s art movement clung to them. Which way to go? What’s a girl to do?... Mirrors have become an obsession, the clearest throughline in her work. By introducing the baby photos into her oeuvre as a work, Redgate provides a wormhole.Jacky Redgate: Mirrors takes readers through a series of carefully orchestrated ftashes, reversals, smoke and mirrors to throw new light on contemporary artistic practice. And with this, the first monograph on the artist in over a decade, we are invited to consider Redgate’s work anew.About the Editors Robert Leonard is Chief Curator at City Gallery Wellington, in New Zealand. He curated Jacky Redgate’s survey, Visions from Her Bed, at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, in 2008. Ann Stephen is Senior Curator, University Art Gallery, University of Sydney. She curated Mirror Mirror: Then and Now, in 2009 and Jacky Redgate: Mirrors, at the University Art Gallery, the University of Sydney, in 2015.120 pages, hardback. 90 colour images, 28.5 (h) x 22 (w) cm
