For thinking people (this column's core clientele), there is always something disturbing about looking at great apes alive in a zoo or taxidermised in museums. They are too like us for us to be sure which of us is the one on exhibition, the one being ogled.
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Melbourne artist Julia Ciccarone captures these worries worryingly well in her painting, Reflection, a star of the Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize exhibition at the National Archives of Australia.
She tells us that she likes the idea of people finding their own explanations for what's going on in the painting and so doesn't want to prescribe what it all means. But she does say that, yes, she's seen a gorilla just like this one, exhibited in a glass case in the Berlin Natural History Museum and that the work has to do with ''people looking at themselves''.
Her comments posted beside the painting include searching questions - ''So how do you see yourself?''
She'd like us to be unsure which of the figures in the painting, man or ape, is asking these questions of the other.
This (free of charge) exhibition for thinking folk continues till November 11.
