The West Australian Pulse 2022: Michaela Oberlin-Brown details modern vices putting pressure on young people

Michaela Oberlin-Brown fondly recalls trips to the Art Gallery of WA during her final two years of high school at Governor Stirling Senior High School to see the annual Year 12 Perspectives exhibition. In fact, she found the excursions inspiring. “I remember coming here in Year 11 and the guide asked, ‘Give us a show of hands if you want to be in this exhibition one day’, and I was the one that put my hand up,” Ms Oberlin-Brown laughed during a recent interview at AGWA. Her four-part painting The Modern Vices is part of this year’s exhibition, now called The West Australian Pulse. “It’s very exciting,” she added. “I’m just fully realising that I’m in this exhibition that I have looked up to for years.” Ms Oberlin-Brown’s work features realistic depictions of a beer bottle, a handful of pills, a tube of lipstick and a pregnancy test to symbolise “modern vices” impacting on her life and those of her peers. “They’re representing some of the pressures that are put on teenagers,” she explained. “It’s trying to put you in the perspective of a teenager feeling the pressure that we’re under. “Pressures of alcohol and drug abuse, trying to look a certain way and the pressure of teenage sex and relationships.” Ms Oberlin-Brown added that, in particular, there was “a lot of pressure from the age of 15” to drink alcohol. The Modern Vices took inspiration from Renaissance paintings as well as British figurative painter Lucian Freud. While she had hoped to focus on animation for her ATAR visual arts course last year, Ms Oberlin-Brown said that COVID restrictions meant she could not rely on having access to school resources. “I ended up painting instead because that’s what I had access to,” she explained. “Once I did a painting in Year 11 for my project, (my teacher) was like, ‘Nup, you’re doing painting from now on’.” A budding artist since she was a small child, Ms Oberlin-Brown recently dropped out of studying science at Curtin University to pursue a potential career as a tattoo artist. “That’s what I actually enjoy,” she said. The West Australian Pulse 2022 exhibition is at AGWA to July 24.