The Boy, 2008

It’s fun to spend time looking at work from other genres and countries, and I’ve been having a hoot lately exploring Australian photographers. I met a pair of collectors at The New York Photo Festival whose enthusiasm was infectious, and they recommend I check out the following folks:

Brook Andrew
Pat Brassington
Ann Noble
Patricia Piccinini
Destiny Deacon
Petrina Hicks
Rosemary Laing

Today let’s focus on Petrina Hicks. Her work is reminiscent of Loretta Lux‘s, though perhaps slightly more sinister. And there are animals. From Hicks’ bio:

“Hicks gently subverts the pervasive language of photography as it is used in advertising and publicity, creating edgy images that intrigue and disturb. While she primarily works with people, her works transcend the boundaries of portraiture as she finds beauty in perceived imperfections and renders idealized beauty strange.

Her images are mostly of adolescents and elegantly capture the ambiguities of youth. Whilst she uses digital interventions, they are almost imperceptible, creating instead a polished hyper-reality. These subtle contrasts within the image play with photography’s dual capacities as both a revealer of truths, and a perpetrator of lies. Hicks’ photography embraces the scope of what it means to be human.”

Take a look. And don’t miss the video links at the end. They are AMAZING.

Rosemary's Baby, 2008

“Following a 3 month residency in La Cité, Paris, Hicks exhibited her most recent body of work, The Descendants at Stills Gallery, 2008. Continuing with her large-scale photographic portraiture Hicks’ immaculate works probe those dualities that are at the heart of contemporary photography – traversing the fine lines between closeness and distance, between perfection and imperfection and between truth and falseness. Lambswool, for instance depicts a young blonde subject, almost impossibly neat, embracing a wolfhound, which gently chews on her arm. This image was Hicks’ winning entry of the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award 2008.”

Lambswool, 2008

Red Roses, 2008

Eye Candy, 2008

Lauren #1, 2006

Shenae and Jade, 2005

Deb, 2006

Nastasja, 2006

Excalibur, 2006

“In an interesting departure, The Descendants includes a series of video portraits. Hicks further confounds the real and hyper-real by employing a visual convention used in computer 3D modelling, a 360 degree view of a static subject, slowly rotating before the camera/viewer – but in this case her subjects are real rather than computer generated.”

Ghost in the Shell, 2008

click here to see the video.

Darkness Follows, 2008

click here to see the video.

Babylon, 2008

click here to see the video.