PETRINA HICKS

Every Rose Has Its Thorn

7 July to 14 August 2010

Petrina Hicks is adept at using the seductive and glossy language of commercial photography to create works that probe the false promises of perfection. Every Rose Has Its Thorn, is a precursor to a larger exhibition to be held in early 2011. The works have been created during a number of overseas residencies that became possible after winning the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award in 2008 with the unsettling image Lambswool.

In a time when so much fine art photography embraces the banal and anti-aesthetic as a distancing device from ever-seductive commercial imagery, Hicks has taken a radically alternative approach. She seeks to seduce. Inspired by the overt lushness and tangible quality of Baroque painting and continuing a preoccupation with the aesthetics of advertising, Hicks explores the high and low art of persuasion. As if to understand the mechanics of this art she pulls it apart, extracting, classifying and itemising elements of visual seduction. Perfect pink roses, bunches of grapes, fluffy white kittens, and stone statues of an idealised human form, reappear as Hicks distils recurring motifs, singles-out illusory devises and over-saturates symbolism. It is seduction on steroids.

As if removed from their original placement such as in an historic still life or TV commercial, these usually loaded figures and objects take on an unnerving ambiguity. They are full to the brim with empty promise, deliberately absent of meaning in their context-less, slogan-free state. Using solid-colour backgrounds of sweet pink, electric blue and nuclear greens, her works appear like single-layers in Photoshop, lacking the insertion of generic scenery, the overlayed picture of a perfume bottle or a cleverly placed brand logo.

Cut loose from the products they could potentially promote, faceless glossy heads of hair, for example, float as if held up by a breeze-machine rather than body, hanging in limbo without a pretty shampoo-endorsing model to be retouched and reinstated. Similarly the kittens seem sadly obsolete without rolls of toilet tissue, sympathy messages or easy-open tins of cat food justifying their fluffy frivolity.

© Petrina Hicks, Every Rose Has its Thorn, 2010

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By refining and filtering how imagery appeals to our senses and then denying us the satisfaction of clear connotation or desire, Hicks subtly and quietly teases the threads of consumerism and unravels the relationship between beauty and money.

Petrina Hicks' work has attracted many accolades over her relatively short career. As well as being announced as the Overall Winner in the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award in 2008, her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in ParisPhoto 2008, Contemporary Australia: Optimism, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art 2008, Petrina Hicks: Australia-Japan, The Exchange of Viewpoints, Early Gallery, Osaka, Japan, 2006. Her works are in numerous collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria and Queensland Art Gallery.

© Maleonn, Second hand Tang Poem No. 5, 2007

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Maleonn graduated from the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University, where he studied in Graphic Design. After working in film for advertising for 10 years he decided to pursue his own art practice. In the few years since focusing on his art career Maleonn is now one of the most respected artists working in this medium in China, and also rapidly making his mark worldwide. His works have been exhibited and collected widely throughout Asia, American and Europe including at the Victoria & Albert Museum London.

MALEONN (Ma Liang)

Second-hand Tang Poem

7 July to 14 August 2010

Photographer Maleonn (also known as Ma Liang) lives and works in Shanghai. His images contain highly choreographed scenes that blend traditional Chinese mythology and contemporary life. His Second-hand Tang Poem series reflects on the way Tang poems have operated in everyday Chinese life. For centuries, elementary students memorised the poems and used them to learn to read and write and even now they are memorised and recited but their meaning feels somehow second-hand. His work is a visual interpretation and contemporary re-telling of these poems.

The creation of Second-hand Tang Poem was inspired by his reading of a book - “New Annotation on the 300 Tang Poems” by Zhao Changping, which employed a great amount of well-documented and extensive evidence and analysis that Maleonn had never read before, completely different from what he got from his textbooks. He says of the experience; “My heart was quaked by his work and I was astonished. Later, I specially bought a lot of related books and read hours every night for months, in the hope that I could describe what I wanted to say through a group of works.”

He made up the scenes for the creation of this series on a huge table, there was real clay and rocks, artificial trees and moss grass, and traditional landscape by glass. He also made up models of men and architectural features such as alcoves and steps. His own “ugly calligraphy” (as he calls it) was hung by fishing lines. Clouds and fog were produced by a small fog producer, while moisture effect was produced by a water pot.

Usually it took him 2-3 days to construct one scene. He adjusted the scenery again and again based on his digital photography drafts before he finally photographed on film. When the photography was finished he had to destroy the whole scene he had created as he only had one large table. It was really painful but he describes how he “tasted the painful feeling of existence that could never be duplicated in photography.”