Warren Hicks / Untethered / Horace Williams House
1. Entering exhibition / [Manual Escalator]
At the Horace Williams House, to enter the main gallery you must walk up a few stairs where you come face to face with the first piece in the show, mounted on a major feature of the space, a massive four-sided column. Which means when you enter you are below the artwork and must walk upwards to meet it. Warren Hicks’ selection for this column, for the first glimpse, the opening salvo for his show Untethered, is a site-specific riff on an architectural encounter. The work at the top of the stairs is a black and white photo of a narrow stairwell viewed looking up from below. I think I gasped looking up at this work. The double-upwardness of it, looking up an actual stairwell from a level below pictorial eye level while looking up at a photo shot looking up a stairwell from below. Moreover, doing so as one walks up to meet the work underscores a sensation of narrowing and walls closing in. A subliminal double claustrophobic panic.
This architectural/motional/perceptual encounter brought to mind that cinematographic trick of pulling focus while zooming in (think that scene in Jaws when Chief Brody sees beachgoers going berserk as shark carnage wreaks havoc close to shore). I felt like I was falling backwards while levitating. One might say this work in its stark dankness (dark stairs, dark wood paneling flanking the stairwell, abyss-like darkness awaiting at the top of the stairwell despite bright lights that spill glow along dark ledges, splash luminous wash on the dirty white walls and forge compositional linearities) is a bit Lynchian. But I also got a Kubrick vibe from it: the bright ceiling light centered in the upper third of the composition hit my third eye like HAL the computer in 2001. This lit up my frontal cortex like a pinball machine. It dawned on me that the lighting elements in the photo were activating awareness of the actual gallery track lights. The gallery space was now a space ship, and I was in for an alien abduction.[1] Now I was being drawn into the exhibition space – a magnetic pull beyond will or agency. BEAM ME UP.
2. Turning the corner to next side of column / [Dead Van Gogh]
I think I gasped again at the next encounter. A hi-res, brightly graphic color photo (vibrant hues, super clean lines) of a clear modeled glass vase against a brilliant deep yellow wall. The presence of a single brightly colored work in an exhibition with an otherwise delimited color range definitely has shock value. The work has an assertive two-thirds/one-third composition, has a classical feel to it. The vase holds dead flowers that lilt in various arcs, their deadness having voided their color, putting them in desaturated dialog with the other works in the show. The deep glowing formal geometry in yellow/orange reverberates with Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square.[2] The Albers association underscores how flattened out the image is, how it reads as a series of planes, the superflat wall and woodgrain table bisected by the clear glass vase; it is aperspectival. The work is also a study in light and shadow: the shadows of the dead flowers as flat recapitulations of the deadness. After only two works it is evident that a light/shadow dialectic is an active subtext here.
3. Next column / [A Close Shave]
The third photo is the last literally depictive image in the show. It’s like the last thing, literally the last thing and the last literal thing we have to hold onto in the show (that tethers us to something literal). Here Hicks presents a black-and-white photo of a pile of dark used razor blades stacked along the seam where wall meets floor amidst dust and detritus, what appear to be leavings from scraped paint, caulk or drywall. It’s a devastating image.[3] It’s giving work-site materials vibes. The blades may not be rusty (the photo is black and white, so color clues are withheld), but they definitely look used. Hicks’ work life as a museum preparator could be represented here – literally or peripherally/unconsciously. But isn’t one’s work life always bleeding into one’s art life?[4] The wall behind the razor blades is imbued with gray and white tones – sky values – suspended behind the razors like a backdrop in a theatrical production. The composition has a proscenium quality to it, a freeze frame of the dramatic denouement in a theatrical tragedy.[5]
4. Final panel of column / [Balderdash]
Undercutting the expectation of a fourth photo (which could be described as an untethering – more on that below), the fourth/final panel of the column is dedicated to a grid of nine drawings, white acrylic ink on black paper substrates (with white frames). These are calligraphic abstractions, verging on language, that also feel figurative. They appear as swirling/snaking embellishments of light on darkness. The individual marks feel a bit like stitching – embroidered/punctured surfaces – punctuations of luminous white tattooed onto the void. Each work is painstakingly produced like the first letters in an illuminated manuscript. Hicks has said he is unsure how to talk about his current body of work. These ink drawings coalesce as preverbal harbingers signaling deep articulations. Other associations: Australian aboriginal paintings, organic [macroscopic or microscopic] organisms – questions of scale will continue to reverberate throughout the show.
5. First faceted wall [Collapse]
An encounter with a grid of six black and white photos. They read immediately as packing material studies, starkly lit close-ups of warped and woofed diamond gridded drab expandable mesh. Now I am reading them as 1930s Hollywood portraits of inanimate talent, industrial glam shots. Now I am reading them as diagrams, schematics, experiments, imagined architectures, world building. Now I am reading them as mathematical equations, spatial/topological calibrations, spawn of MC Escher, mathematical surrealism. They also have something to do with the body, cross-sections of subcutaneous tissue caught in flagrante, “caught on Candid Camera.”[6]
6. Second faceted wall [No Escape]
Another grid of black and white nonliteral imagery. Ambiguous blackness pitted against luminous H20 droplet explosions. My first association is to that photo experiment, a stroboscopic photograph capturing the stunning structural coherency of a single splash of milk, Harold Eugene Edgerton’s Milk Drop Coronet (1957).[7] I feel similar impulses in these works. They have me majorly tripping (and make me thirsty). They trigger something essential about water as the basis of all life. Issues of scale are also leveraged: these appear to be extreme close-ups of liquid cataclysms. But they could also be microscopic. Then again, a case could be made that they indicate expanded interplanetary luminosities that fluctuate beyond human perceptual capabilities. The works provide the visual stimuli required for a choose-your-own adventure in the realm of physics, liquids, gravity, light and technology – an intergalactic joyride.
7. Second faceted wall (Part II) / [Discombobulatory Decay #1]
A single work is offset to the right of the above-described grid. Related but separate, here the emphasis is a side-view encompassing the areas above and below a liquid surface (presumably shot through a clear container), another two-thirds/one-third composition. Suddenly I am teleported back in time to tenth grade, Introduction to Physical Science class. Smash-cut: it’s an ultrasound: fetal P.O.V. Now we’re back to something about the essence of water, back to the origins of life: single-celled organism P.O.V. Whatever is actually being represented in this work, it is putting us in direct contact with (or at very least raising questions about) fundamental yet mysterious / mysterious yet fundamental / phenomena.
7.5 Archival function
Before seeing the show, despite doing what I could to avoid precursor visual input online or elsewhere, I did out of the corner of my eye see representations of some of the work, which led to the inevitable preemptive responses, associations, assumptions. Based on those preliminary glimpses, I associated the works with early photography experiments, spirit photography, surrealist photography, archival photography. In retrospect, such associations only go so far. First of all, there is no sepia anywhere to be found in the show (I somehow projected that in my mind). And in person, the work does not feel early or archival. However: there is something about how the works live in the mind AFTER having seen them, how they function in retrospect. Ultimately, there is something about this work that can be addressed in terms of the archive – or archivality (a word I just made up for these purposes). Upon in-person impact, they seem to make a direct hit on one’s perceptual apparatus and produce an immediate archive. At least this was the case for me. There’s some kind of temporal implosion going on there. Instant archive: just add water.
8. Back faceted wall / [Prism Sails]
A series of six photos presented in a linear alignment across the space. These works are studies in luminosity and transparency against a dark field. The works present what appear to be crushed and manipulated cellophane or some other similar clear acrylic material. They are action shots, freeze frames of kinetic manipulations. They convey a painterly sensibility, a precise color palette. The key colors include rich inky blacks, glaring transparent whites, low-key chartreuse tones (the color of a houseplant that needs light and/or water), flashes of [ersatz] strawberry red and deep jewel-toned teals. There is a hint of the chromatic source material in work #7, in which a printed multicolor graphic element is just visible in the background.[8]
9. Synthesis
My reception of these pieces oscillated between perceiving them in terms of either material or immaterial phenomena. As with much of the work in the show, I found myself working to reverse engineer the visual data. A common, foundational, preliminary mode of engaging with art often involves the question, “What am I being presented with? What is it of?” In much of the work in Untethered, I continued to return to the question of whether I was being presented with works that were intended to function as illusions or actualities. Are the works meant to depict what they are (packing material, water, clear plastic)? Or are they illustrations of something else – phenomena that occurs elsewhere, beyond the photographic/pictorial frame, rather than mere documentation of objects/events? Are they images of actions and reactions? Or are they (via some kind of alchemical impulse) made to cause actions/reactions to occur in the viewer in proximity to the work?
Photography largely involves images that result from direct interventions with/in the material world. One imagines Hicks in a lab conducting experiments in search of elevated visual phenomena with the aim of impacting the viewer’s sensorium in unexpected ways. The images function metaphorically as well as abstractly or literally and seemingly impossibly suggest something that might be so internal – biological or subliminal – that we do not yet have words for it.
As noted, Untethered includes three works that answer the preliminary question of depiction: we can identify the images presented. Then, as we are set adrift toward the other works, we are unmoored from our bearings. We are, in a word, untethered from reference points, from conceptual anchors. Shows that include both depictive and abstract works can be simply disorienting, incoherent, i.e., they fail to cohere into something meaningful as a whole. In this case, however, depiction is offset by abstraction in productive and seamless ways. Perhaps this is at least in part a function of how many of the works fluxuate fluidly between image and abstraction. I sometimes think of questions about art and representation as being underpinned by more foundational queries such as, “Where/Who am I in relation to this work?” or “How does this work comport with how I construct myself?” Another institutional flashback, this time to a graduate seminar, “Images, Visual Rhetoric & Graphic Evidence in Biomedical Cultures.” This was a course populated half by humanities students and half by medical students, where we were immersed in historical, theoretical and philosophical inquiry into the imaging of skeletons, eyes, brains, organs and so forth, embodied embrained beings gathered around a table at the UNC medical school in conversation about the ephemeral implications of machine-imaged representations of the human body.[9] The visual rhetoric(s) of much of the work in Untethered reverberate with such imaging modalities (X-rays, CT scans, sonograms, ultrasounds). When I first entered the gallery space, I felt like I was entering a space ship. Upon departure, I felt like I had been put through a whole-person MRI – a turned-inside-out sense that I myself had been imaged.
[1] A splitsecond before I moved toward the next work, I noted the slightly effed-up peg board grid panels on the ceiling in the photo: a 1960s futuristic spaceship dashboard subtly foreshadowing the series in the show presented in grids.
[2] Hicks’ title for this work is Dead Van Gogh, and Vincent’s color story (as well as biography) is certainly another relevant art historical association here. The use of the name of the artist as metonym for a painting by him functions a bit like a double entendre: the death of Van Gogh is legendary, itself a metonym for depression and despair. In this way, given the title, beyond being a still life, the work can be read as elegiac as well as a form of portraiture.
[3] Re: “devastating”: How can one untether the idea of the razor blade from the idea of suicide? The darkness of this observation mandated its relegation to a footnote lest it derail the psychic tenor of the text. [Abbreviated response to this work from my notes: Abrasive: Life is.]
[4] The poet Wallace Stevens was also a “businessman/lawyer” who worked for most of his life at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. How did the specificity of that particular daily grind seep into his perceptual/expressive modes? Apparently some of this is addressed in a book called The Wallace Stevens Case: Law and the Practice of Poetry by Thomas Grey (Harvard University Press, 1991). If we were to posit another book, The Warren Hicks Folio: Museum Work and the Practice of Art, what would we learn?
[5] Another way of thinking about the word “untethered” is “disconnection” – isolation, desolation, loneliness. Presenting artwork publicly is a way of bringing people in proximity with one another, into community. There is an undercurrent of both/and in this show that allows for both impulses to coexist.
[6] Bizarre how looking at works of art sends the synapses off into wild forays into one’s life as an absorptive cultural sponge.
[7] The phrase “The Teardrop Explodes” also springs to mind in relation to these works. This was the name of a British band out of Liverpool (1978-1982). Apparently the phrase has Marvel Comics origins: Daredevil (Vol. 1, No. 77) (June 1971).
[8] On some level I feel like I’m “outing” the series by noting the apparent color source material here. But really that is ridiculous because if Hicks did not want that imagery available to the viewer, he would not have included it in the series. The presence of this almost subliminal hint of identifiable visual information brings the question of depiction versus abstraction into high relief.
[9] The seminar was led by Professor Barry F. Sanders, a medical doctor who taught not only in the UNC med school but also in the Religious Studies, Communications and Anthropology departments. Check out his book, CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive Cutting (Body, Commodity, Text) (Duke University Press, 2008).
Figure 1. Still from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968)
Figure 2. (a) Warren Hicks, Dead Van Gogh, Metallic paper on di-bond (2025); (b) Josef Albers, Homage to the Square - Orange and Yellow, Screenprint (1970); (c) Vincent van Gogh, Japanese Vase with Roses and Anemones, Oil on canvas (1890)
Figure 3. Harold “Doc” Edgerton, Milk Drop Coronet, Stroboscopic photograph (1957)
Figure 4. “The Teardrop Explodes,” Daredevil (Vol. 1, No. 77) (June 1971)
Figure 5. MRI [The author’s brain (2024)]
