Petrina Hicks’ latest series Beautiful Creatures appeals to our senses. Immediately alluring the large-scale, hyper-real photographs, are all rendered so clearly and with such control that they are reminiscent of advertisements, promoting a slick new television series perhaps, or teen clothing range. But with a series of little ruptures, within images and between them, Hicks disrupts our usually beguiled response to such artistry. For her, photography’s capability to both create and corrupt the process of seduction and consumption, is of endless interest.
In her 2010 series Every Rose Has Its Thorn (last two images), Hicks subtly and quietly teases the threads of consumerism and unravels the relationship between beauty and money. As if to understand the mechanics of this art she pulls it apart, extracting, classifying and itemizing elements of visual seduction. Perfect pink roses, bunches of grapes, fluffy white kittens, and stone statues of an idealized human form, reappear as Hicks distils recurring motifs, singles-out illusory devises and over-saturates symbolism. It is seduction on steroids. 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.
