Fresh Cut is our annual emerging artists exhibition with artists selected from student exhibitions at Queensland art schools. This year’s Fresh Cut is a focussed show, with just five artists. Photographer Iselin Stensrud’s young sitters seem perfectly doll-like, with their mask-like faces and their generic clothes and settings suggesting Stepford-style modern perfection and alienation. Does her work critique plastic advertising imagery or exemplify it? Marianne Templeton’s slacker graphics make visual and textual jokes. Her screensaver-like video Eye Sucker is a looping animation of mindless, frenetic, attention-seeking scribble. For her video Only You Know, Chie Yamada superimposes love-letter sentiments over blurry self images in extreme close-up, suggesting an excessive intimacy. The work is seemingly addressed to the viewer: any viewer. Should we take it personally? Jennie Jackson notes that women’s fashion has long exploited a dialectic of concealing and revealing the body. Her surrealist-informed paintings of historical women’s garments suggest creatures, seeds and genitalia: it’s feminism in dialogue with fetishism. For our show, she creates a Rorschaching wallpaper work. Finally, Daniel McKewen slows down a Neutrogena television ad starring Mischa Barton, uncannily morphing the transitions between frames. If the highly produced ad sought to evoke natural beauty, McKewen’s detourned version suggests anything but: the natural has become robotic, the seductive demonic.