Stepping into Mirror Mirror is akin to attending a dystopian wedding—a haunting ceremony where humanity's inherent darkness is veiled in fractured beauty. Zilinsky revels in this contradiction, inviting viewers to confront the incongruity of contemporary society while drawing us into her world of elegant unease.

At the heart of this exhibition lies an unflinching desire to understand what it means to live in this time.  Zilinsky is an obsessive observer of human behaviour—someone who dissects the world with both intimacy and precision. Like peeling back the layers of an onion, her work navigates the surfaces we present and the truths that lie beneath. It is delicate, often painful, and ultimately revealing.

In this body of work, we find the artist interrogating the architecture of modern image-making: the performative gloss of social media, the synthetic rhetoric of AI, the hyper-curated fictions of the digital age. What remains, after the cyclonic news cycles pass, are hard truths—about politics, about connection, about the ways in which we construct and consume identity. In Zilinsky’s universe, these disparate threads—romantic, grotesque, banal—are all tightly wound together, knotted with a single black thread that runs through every image.

This instinct—to observe, to bear witness, to not look away—links Zilinsky to a broader lineage. It is a sensibility we recognise in Francisco Goya, whose court portraits famously eschewed flattery in favour of psychological depth. Goya, blessed with all the gifts of a master painter, could not bring himself to lie. His 1801 portrait Charles IV of Spain and His Family presents not regal grandeur, but human vulnerability. It is not the royal garments we remember, but the unsettling honesty of the scene. And there, in the darkened background, the artist himself—watching and recording.

Zilinsky, too, paints from the shadows. She offers no didactic proclamation, no manifesto. Instead, like Goya, she allows the image to speak for itself. Mirror Mirror is not about fabrication—it is about what remains after the illusion fades. She unpicks the fairy tales we’ve come to accept, dismantles the glittering myths of late capitalism, and questions the very structure of perception itself. 

To make work like this requires more than skill. It demands a kind of fearlessness—a willingness to look hard at the world and render what is found without embellishment. She points out that the images are there for all of us to see - she is just changing the lens of perception. Zilinsky possesses that rare combination of intellectual rigour and artistic clarity. With this exhibition, she positions herself not just as a chronicler of the present, but as a history painter for our time—someone brave enough to hold a mirror to our age and steady enough to let us see what is truly there.

Ralph Hobbs.
June, 2025

OPENING DRINKS: THURSDAY 26 JULY, 6 – 8PM

ARTIST TALK: CAROLINE ZILINSKY IN CONVERSATION WITH MEGAN MONTE
Join us in the gallery for an in-depth conversation between Caroline Zilinsky and Megan Monte, Director of Ngununggula, Southern Highlands Regional Gallery. Together, they'll un-pack the themes, tensions, and contradictions that shape MIRROR MIRROR.  RSVP ESSENTIAL