What’s on Lecture / symposium

Petrina Hicks’ photographs are as beautiful as they are unsettling. In the work Lambswool, a wolf gently bites the soft, woollen cardigan of a young girl, her face turned away from the viewer to reveal her smooth, blonde hair. Is this a modern day interpretation of Red Riding Hood? Is this wolf friend or foe? No matter what the meaning, the soft hues and dream-like calmness of the image, a repeated characteristic in Hicks’ work, draw the viewer into its world of ambiguous fantasy.

Jacky Redgate was born in England and moved to Australia at a young age, where she established her career as an artist. Her exhibition, Jacky Redgate: the logic of vision, currently on at the Art Gallery of NSW, exemplifies her diverse photographic styles. Naar het Schilder-Boeck is a series of symbolic images in black and white, inspired by a book published in the Netherlands in 1604, which described metaphors used by artists in their paintings. Another series, Light throw (mirrors), depicts colourful plastic objects removed from their everyday context and represented as blurred and semi-abstract shapes. Light throw (mirrors) #4 from this series won Redgate the prestigious William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize in 2011.

Merilyn Fairskye’s photographs capture familiar subjects: people walking with purpose through city streets, landscapes and ocean scenes, and close-up portraits of people with their eyes closed. Each series has its own distinct style, from the frenetic, blurred urban scenes to the colour saturated space-filled tranquility of ocean and landscapes. In 2011 Fairskye travelled to Chernobyl to document the city 25 years after the nuclear disaster. The resulting images of the everyday, such as ferris wheels, parks and factories, become clouded with nostalgia and melancholy when we realise these seemingly liveable areas are sites of abandonment and contamination to this day.