Heather Straka (b.1972) has a Master of Fine Arts from Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury and lives and works in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau. She has received several awards and residencies, including the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago, and is represented in significant private and public collections.

Lost in a dream sees the artist painting from photographs composed and captured in her studio to create a series of inscrutable portraits set against dreamlike backdrops reminiscent of early colonial landscapes. The resulting paintings are characterised by Straka’s ongoing pursuit of unexpected perspectives. Here, despite the obscure backward viewpoint, these portraits are undeniably intimate – the artist delicately renders a whisp of hair at the nape of a neck, the curve of a bare shoulder, the vulnerable line of a shoulder blade. Presented in a cameo frames, the works are imbued with a sense of Victorian restraint that resonates with Straka’s subtle and sensitive compositions. Yet there is a sense of unease in these works, a lingering impression that something or someone else is hovering beyond the frame. Whether this is the artist herself or some other more malevolent observer is unclear. Perhaps Straka is positioning the viewer as the intrusive reprobate? The interplay of these various relationships – between artist and subject, subject and viewer, gaze and desire, privacy and surveillance – is explicitly emphasised by a series of accompanying peephole eye paintings.

Straka has established a way of working that sees her continually oscillating between painting and photography. This consciously cyclical mode of making plays well to the artist’s preoccupation with notions of artifice, convention, authenticity, and representation. Earlier works saw Straka reimagine 19th Century portraits by Sydney Parkinson and Gottfried Lindauer while another project saw the mass duplication by Chinese artisans of Straka's interpretation of a portrait based on women depicted in early 20th Century calendar painting. Straka’s most recent exhibition with Page Galleries consisted of a series of staged photographs unfolding inside dilapidated interiors within which an intriguing cast of characters occupied a shallow space, dramatically lit. In these works, Straka drew together various global events, including the destruction of sculptures and monuments to colonialism and patriarchal oppression in a global groundswell to destabilise the politics of history and its sanctioned authors. Straka spent hours creating the sets for these photographs, inspired by a 1930s Germanic hotel, and the resulting images appear almost as film stills that in turn recall a suite of paintings the artist made for the shadowy interiors of the television adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries.