Deborah Paauwe

Born 1972, Pennsylvania, USA

Deborah Paauwe, who looks to New York City as her next Mecca, throws Kristian Burford's peeping tom perspective into relief with her highly personal surveillance of family photographs. Photography, after all, is burdened with the surreptitious posture of voyeurism and in Paauwe's case, the step toward public scrutiny of her mother's photo album achieves a pop patois of hidden Chinese identity.

In works like Blue Tights or, From the Waist Down, photography capitulates to Paauwe's personal iconography of Australasian identity. It isolates rather than integrates signs of unspoken family memories. Paauwe says it frames an experience never had "first hand." She and we know that photographs are not the only things that lie.

M.A. Greensteinfrom her Samstag catalogue essay, Back to the Future – From Wry to Rave
 
1999 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
1999 MFA, Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, UK 
1995 Post-Graduate Diploma in Management (Arts), University of South Australia, Adelaide 
1994 Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts), South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide 

Artist's website
http://www.deborahpaauwe.com/