Midnight Gift
Deborah Paauwe
2004 | C-type photograph | edition 1 of 6
accession number 637
purchased by the Art Board 2005 - Murdoch University Art Collection

Deborah PAAUWE

born 1972 Pennsylvania, USA
lives and works South Australia

Paauwe is one of Australia’s youngest and leading contemporary photographers, whose work is represented in many significant national art collections. Her photographs are usually developed as a series of narrative images with an underlying theme. Midnight Gift is one of six different photographic images from a series called Dark Fables. The title of this series refers to the ambiguous nature of fairy tales, where both beauty and evil can occupy the same space.

Midnight Gift depicts an ambiguous and uneasy image of a young girl theatrically spotlight and dressed in a child-pageant queen style dress with intricate lace and beaded panels. The haunting image is reminiscent of the tragic unsolved murder of American child-pageant queen, Jon Benet Ramsay. However, the girl’s gothic-like painted face and vintage costume surrounded by blackness also evokes images of actress, Kirsten Dunst’s portrayal of the predator-like child vampire in the movie, Interview with a Vampire.

In Paauwe’s world fiction and fairy tales are only slightly removed from reality. Ambiguity is a strong characteristic of Paauwe’s photographs. The works are suggestive of artifice and poignant realism, sexuality and innocence, life and death. Her subjects are usually young women, photographed asymmetrically and in beautiful vintage costumes. The images evoke the childhood memories and playful imagination that impact on adult life, and the natural but seductive transition from childhood to adulthood.

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