Recent photographic work by Gavin Hipkins
THE WORK OF NEW ZEALAND PHOTOGRAPHER GAVIN HIPKINS interpolates the lasciviousness and referentiality of the photographic image through both the intimate subjectivities of personal compulsion and the abstraction of creative strategies. Hipkins's affair with the photographic is a conceptual and aesthetic liaison evident in more than ten years of practice. His work has been exhibited internationally in Europe and North and South America and been seen in the 1998 Sydney Biennale and a nurriber of Australian galleries, as well as having an ongoing presence in public and commercial galleries in New Zealand.[1]
Compared to his photographic predecessors in New Zealand, particularly Laurence Aberhart and Peter Peryer, Hipkins ratchets up the pressure on the communicative role of the photographic image and hence the interpretative responsibility of the audience. His images signal but do not resolve into a constellation of theoretical contexts, photographic histories and sociological and psychological speculations. If this is an outcome of what has been described as Hipkins's 'photophillia', this photography is obsessive, compelled by complex preoccupations beyond its material and visual references.[2] Fetishisation and control are bought into operation to focus and designate context while avoiding specific meaning, thereby enabling space for the operation of local and particular intelligence as well as textual interpretations, as can be evidenced in three recent projects by Hipkins.
Hipkins's oeuvre can be classified in a formal sense into two general types : either centralised, tightly composed images of single objects or photographs assembled into larger groups or installations. Scenic images or 'views ' are characteristically unpopulated and lack a horizon or field of vision that would otherwise provide situational context and potentially assist in establishing narrative associa tion.[3] However... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline