A JAMBEROO artist will be asking the viewer to consider their place in the world at a new exhibition in Sydney.
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Painter Halinka Orszulok's latest exhibition at the Flinders Street Gallery, Swamp Motel, opens on September 3 and runs until September 26.
The 37-year-old has been painting and exhibiting since graduating from university in 2002.
This has included a number of solo shows, group shows interstate and in recent times regularly showcasing her work at Flinders Street Gallery. Last year, her work was hung at the Art Gallery of NSW as part of the Sulman Art Prize.
For her latest show, Orszulok took photographs around the Kiama area, including Swamp Road and the Gerringong bends.
"I take photos, and then I paint from them quite photo realistically," she said. "The first part of the process is stalking around at night with my poor hus-band in tow, finding source material to work from.
"My work tends to focus on environments that are a bit hard to define, and places that are neither here nor there ... they're not very personal spaces.
"They're spaces that I suppose resist any kind of definition, places you might travel through. The idea is there's an atmosphere that can encourage an introspective attitude."
She works from a small printed snapshot to reproduce the image, which she said was a laborious, patience-testing process.
"With photography there's the sense of a passing, fleeting moment, but when you paint you know it takes a long time, and it kind of asks the viewer to spend a bit more time looking at something that they might not normally look at."
Another focus was making the viewer consider their place in the world.
"Landscape traditionally is I guess about examining our place in the world as human beings," she said. "I always take photos at night. You think of night time, and there's streams of the subconscious and perhaps a sense of the uncanny, the mysterious.
"It kind of takes you outside of yourself."