MAPh is currently seeking expressions of interest for the touring exhibition Petrina Hicks | Snakes and mirrors.
Petrina Hicks’s large-scale photographs draw from mythology, fables and art history to re-frame the contemporary female experience.
Permeated with a sense of magical realism, animals and females often appear together to represent aspects of psyche and identity, alluding to the complexity of female identity and the sentience of animals. Central to her work are the porous boundaries between human and animal states, and the affinity of females and animals.
In Snakes and mirrors Hicks contemplates the self-awareness of animals, and our desire to understand the phenomenology of animal life from a human perspective. Underpinning this series is an exploration of animal consciousness and self-awareness: how do animals experience the universe?
Hicks was moved by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Eighth Elegy’, which portrays the mystical relationship between humans and animals, and contemplates how humans and animals experience time and phenomena differently.
Humans perceive time as a linear continuum: of past, present, future; however, for animals, Rilke suggests they exist in a unified, harmonious totality completely different to our world view. The animal sees the world as a unity; the animal is part of the world, not separated from it as subject and object. An animal is not conscious of the finite nature of existence, with death as the end date.
Within Snakes and mirrors Hicks challenges the traditional human-centred vision of the world to emphasise the interconnectedness of humans and animals – serpents, birds, monkeys and human bind together, blurring the boundaries between the two in intimate vignettes that propose time in stasis.
