Sunkissed

There is a brilliance to Australian light that makes it stand above any other. It turns sand into gold, making beaches paradise. In Sunkissed, Michal Reid Northern Beaches presents contemporary photography from Andy Jon Morris, Petrina Hicks, and Yvette Hamilton against triumphant historic works by Max Dupain. The exhibition is a cacophonous celebration of the radiant energy of Australian sunlight.

When Max Dupain set out to craft the image of a Modern Australian, the sun was of crucial importance. in Bondi two figures stand firm, rooted into the sand. Harsh lines cut through the images, transforming the human into sculptural. Yet, under the light, they soften into echoes of a new Australian identity. One that was defined through relaxation and leisure.

In Andy Jon Morris’s photographs we see the outcome of Dupain’s images. Joy, excitement, and beauty all wrapped up in a blanket of golden light. The softness of a mid-afternoon haze meanders through these works. Time slips away into memory. It isn’t clear if the world that Morris creates is real or imagined. In these lush, saturated images, the truth is somewhere in between.

Petrina Hicks work is encased in mythic sensibility, evoking an ethereal beauty in her works. For Melo Melo, Hicks engages in an act of transfiguration, suspending a shell into a mythic stasis. Caught in a bubble of yellowed light, colours fly across twisting ravines, diamond rays of silver and gold refracting into the cosmos.

Yvette Hamilton’s process takes this one step further. Drawing on 19th century photo-chemical processes, Hamilton imprints the sun directly onto photographic paper, burning the celestial body into her work. What we see is not matter but anti-matter, the spectral trail of a star, blazing through the sky.

There is a sense of the surreal in all these works. As the sun beats down upon them, figures become abstracted and mystified, people grow large into towering monoliths, or are hidden through a golden haze of memory. Entire words condensed into palimpsestic images. Under warm rays of light, each photograph glows.