Concrete Playground

Evidencing the extraordinary breadth of contemporary photography, Petrina Hicks' new exhibition, Every Rose Has Its Thorn and Maleonn's Second-hand Tang Poem at Paddington's Stills Gallery are realms apart.

Known for her slick aesthetic and glossy backgrounds, Hicks presents a series of images that serve to question the very thing we're looking at. The faceless profiles in Breeze and Firestarter leave us wondering — like Magritte's hooded figures and his famous painting This Is Not a Pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) — if a profile is indeed a profile if missing a face to define it. The face is further obscured with veiled figures and the backs of kittens, while still lives swim in super-real backgrounds heightening the sense of ambiguity in Every Rose.

Maleonn (aka Ma Liang) has constructed a suite of scenes relating to Tang poems, which have been used by teenagers in China for generations and which, when memorised, assist in learning to read and write and to cultivate culture. From this genre, Maleonn imagines a wonderland that seems not of this world but derived from it. Macabre and funny at once, the Second-hand Tang Poem series is narrative-thick and imbued with a dramatic sense of time. Following his capturing of the image, Maleonn had to deconstruct each scene, sensing acutely "the painful feeling of existence that could never be duplicated in photography".

Image by Petrina Hicks