Rebecca Ann Hobbs

Born 1976, Townsville, Queensland 

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
 
2003 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
2003 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, USA
2002 Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) Photography, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne
2001 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Photography, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne 

Artist's website
http://rebeccaannhobbs.com/