Could we really have thought that there are just too many people doing the photography-video thing? Could we have really gone all fogey and started blaming the medium for the lack of interest we find in work in galleries? Pretty soon we’ll be saying that painting is making a comeback and to hell with your lambda prints and your edition of six videos, we want quality etchings and we want ‘em now! Ahem.
Monika Tichacek is so hot right now we’re not even ashamed to use the word ‘hot’. With her show The Shadowers at Sherman Galleries being only her third solo show (the other two being at Artspace in Sydney and Karen Woodbury Gallery in Melbourne), an appearance on the cover of Australian Art Collector and eight awards and scholarships – including the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship in 2001 – since graduating from The NSW College of Fine Arts in 1999, Tichacek is being set up as the “It Girl” of the moment. Naturally, we were already cynical before we had set foot in a gallery and looked at her work. Surely, we thought, Tichacek can’t be that good, can she?
The answer is yes and no. Although Tichacek has only had three solo shows she’s been in nearly 40 group shows and she obviously knows how to construct an artful image that echoes her influences while making a claim for individuality. The work’s glossy sheen – and we’re only talking about the photographic works in Sherman’s The Shadowers – is remarkably slick. Using lightjet prints mounted behind acrylic, The Shadowers images are stygian noir narratives buffed up to a showroom shine. If black could glow, then this is what it looks like.
Monika Tichacek, The Shadowers’ #4, 2004.
The downside of the images is that the influences are perhaps a little too obvious. Who knows if Tichacek is actually influenced by Matthew Barney but it sure looks like it in some of the works. The Shadower’s #16 features a vampire like figure with dead eyes and some kind of facial prosthetic that appears to come straight out of Cremaster 3. The works also lack cohesiveness as a series. Many artist/photographers work this way but very few seem able to make each image as strong as the best of what they do, some feeling more like filler than individual works that stand on their own. Tichacek’s 13 prints suffer from this lack of focus but unlike many other young artists working in photomedia, she is able to create some iconic images.
The Shadowers #1 is the image of the show. The work has a pair of legs standing against a black background. Dressed in spangly shorts, stockings and heels, the shapely legs of the female figure hold apart a viciously threaded spider’s web of twine that pierces the skin in welts. It’s an image that is rife with a frank sexuality that isn’t shy to speak up for its otherness. The Shadowers # 4 with its play between ectoplasmic transference and the nether world of pornographic play matches #1 in its intensity while#13’s vampire blood rites manages a precarious balance between the inspired and the self conscious crappiness of high camp.
It’s easy to forget that the heat around certain artists and their seemingly sudden and inexplicable rise to prominence is sometimes the result of a real talent at work. Something needs to stoke the fire. It was a pleasant revelation to discover that Tichacek has the talent to back up up her sudden notorierty.
