Stills Gallery

The Descendants

Petrina Hicks

Petrina Hicks' immaculate large-scale portraiture represents something more than individual likeness. Beneath the highly polished and controlled surface of her images lies an eerie, unsettling psychological distance. Hicks' 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. For Hicks these are qualities that punctuate the continuum from animal to cyborg, her subjects exist somewhere between human and computer creation.

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.

 Lambswool, 2008 © Petrina Hicks

Image: Lambswool, 2008 © Petrina Hicks
  WHERE & WHEN

18 June - 19 July 2008

ARTIST TALK
Saturday, 5 July, 2pm

 
Stills Gallery
36 Gosbell St, Paddington, NSW 2021
www.stillsgallery.com.au

Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am - 6pm

Free