GAB 46 (Grishin’s Art Blog 46)

Memorable and disturbing images of Petrina Hicks

Petrina Hicks: Bleached Gothic, NGV Australia, installation photograph S Grishin

 
The Sydney-based photographic artist, Petrina Hicks, has established a reputation for very deliberate, arresting images that play with the shape of time. They are sparse images, where all extraneous detail has been deleted as you are forced to witness a disturbing encounter with something that is frequently ethereal, uncanny and mercilessly uncompromising. There is a subdued eroticism in many of the photographs, but one that does not invite voyeurism or male sexual gratification.
 

Petrina Hicks: Bleached Gothic, NGV Australia, installation photograph S Grishin

 
Unlike some photographers who champion a form of illustrative academic narrative, Hicks is stingy in not providing us with too many clues – the image is the thing that matters and it is allowed to assert its own form of magic without depending on a verbal or theoretic commentary. However, in the imagery, there is a rich resonance with art historical associations, mythology and literature. Once the primacy of the image has been established, it is allowed to find echoes within a broad cultural framework, at times employing strategies from montage and surrealism.
 
Hicks has been working for about fifteen years with the same model – Lauren, an albino singer and performer – who does not appear to have aged over this passage of time. There is a touch of the otherworldly about Lauren – a delicate fragility where light seems to bleach detail and to erode corporeality of her body.
 

Petrina Hicks, Lauren 2003, from the Lauren series 2003, pigment inkjet print, 100.0 x 83.0 (image) Collection of the artist, courtesy Michael Reid, Sydney; and This Is No Fantasy, Melbourne © Petrina Hicks

 
Hicks poses her models in unlikely juxtapositions – a girl appears to be swallowing a budgie’s head, Lauren in an awkward position is holding ten peaches (to add to the enigma we are informed that they are bruised peaches), a girl holds a large pink conch shell that seems to conceal her face in a surreal gesture. On other occasions, dogs, snakes and cats seem to drape themselves lovingly around the female figures. Apart from some unnecessary heavy-handed punning in some of the titles – Bird’s eye, Bird fingers and She wolf – the interpretation of these enigmatic images is left to the viewer.
 

Petrina Hicks, Bruised peaches 2018, from the Still Life Studio series 2018 ed. 2/4, pigment inkjet print, 120.0 x 120.0 cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2018, © Petrina Hicks. Courtesy of Michael Reid, Sydney; and This Is No Fantasy, Melbourne

 
The uncanny has been a popular hunting ground for many contemporary photomedia artists and one need only think of someone like Pat Brassington. Hicks’ photography can in part be interpreted as lying within the general spectrum of the uncanny, but it pulls in a slightly different direction.  Her photography is large-scale, glossy and seductive in its presentation with more than a passing nod to commercial photography in which the artist has served an apprenticeship.
 

Petrina Hicks, Shenae and Jade 2005 from Untitled series 2005 pigment inkjet print 100.0 x 93.0 (image) Collection of the artist, courtesy Michael Reid, Sydney; and This Is No Fantasy, Melbourne © Petrina Hicks

 
For Hicks, a game with time is one of her main strategies in creating an image. Isobel Crombie, the curator of the Petrina Hicks: Bleached Gothic exhibition that has just opened at the National Gallery of Victoria at Federation Square, observes, “Hicks’s work often seems to slow down time into one compressed moment”.
 
In some ways, it is also an ‘arrested’ compressed moment, where there is a projected path of transition – puberty, unfinished action or concealed vision – that has been arrested when time slows down, as in a Bill Viola sequence. But unlike in Viola, it is not allowed to find its resolution. Does the girl swallow the budgerigar? Will the snake sting her Cleopatra? Will the wolf devour the lamb? Will the girl ever grow up? The created situations are unusual, even uncanny, and we are left with an enigmatic image with very few clues provided to help us to resolve it.
 

Petrina Hicks, Venus 2013, from the The Shadows series 2014, pigment inkjet print, Collection of the artist, courtesy Michael Reid, Sydney; and This Is No Fantasy, Melbourne © Petrina Hicks

 
Hicks’ large-scale, high-gloss pigment inkjet prints are not only striking on first encounter, but they are also memorable, more so in the flesh with the experience of scale and surface, than in reproduction. Over the years when I have seen her images in various exhibitions, I have found that they become engraved in my memory – they are the sort of images that cannot be easily ‘unremembered’. They are very deliberate and highly contrived compositions, where nothing has been left to chance and all that is not part of the central idea has been deleted from the image. Hicks works with medium-format film photography, where much of the image is resolved in the exposure rather than through later manipulation.
 

Petrina Hicks: Bleached Gothic, NGV Australia, installation photograph S Grishin

 
In the few examples of video work presented in this exhibition, Hicks seems to enjoy her game with subdued eroticism, where the sensuousness of a young girl licking a flower is frozen in time and seems to hint at a possibly sinister dimension. Have we witnessed something that is private and innocent, but can be defiled by the gaze of the outsider?
 
At the age of forty-seven and with over twenty solo exhibitions and over a hundred national and international group shows, Hicks cannot be considered an emerging artist, but one who has a distinguished track record. Her visual curiosity and probing intellect give this exhibition a sense of consistent visual excitement by an artist, who in this exhibition explores autobiographical truths through a cast of characters who play out her fears, phobias and thought adventures.
 

Petrina Hicks, Emily the strange 2011, from the Beautiful Creatures series 2011, pigment inkjet print, 100.0 x 100.0 (image) Collection of the artist, courtesy Michael Reid, Sydney; and This Is No Fantasy, Melbourne © Petrina Hicks

 
Petrina Hicks: Bleached Gothic, NGV Australia, Federation Square, Level 3, 27 Sep 2019 – 29 Mar 20 20, Open 10am–5pm daily, [no admission charges]