Allie Hicks

Artist Statement

In their work, Allie Hicks draws on their personal upbringing in both Appalachian superstition and the traditionalism of the United States' geographic South. Hicks skews portraits and domestic scenes to often nightmarish effects in order to create dissonance and tension. While often positioning their audience as spectators, Hicks uses a voyeuristic perspective in their art to evoke the irrationality, morbidity, and simultaneous isolation and paranoia of Southern Gothicism.

Biography

Allie Hicks (they/them/theirs) is a queer Appalachian artist based in Knoxville, Tennessee. Raised in an Evangelical Christian household in the United States' Bible Belt, Hicks uses Southern Gothic themes and atmospheric horror to approach their relationship with Appalachian culture and superstition. Hicks' work is influenced by their own psychiatric disabilities and lifelong history with auditory and tactile hallucinations namely, the ways Hicks' evangelical upbringing positioned their disabilities and psychosis as supernatural and the products of demonic intervention. Having experienced chronic nightmares nightly for over twenty years, Hicks also regularly incorporates imagery from their nightmare disorder into their art. In their body of work, Hicks focuses on centering the human body and lived experiences as vessels of knowing and learning, speaking also to their experience as a self-taught artist. Whether through figure drawing or paper collage, Hicks introduces the familiar to surrealist circumstances, resulting in a body of work that centers the uncanny.

Most recently, Hicks was featured in the Tennessee-based collaborative art show "Tittie City," an 18+ exhibit exploring the vast range of experiences and emotions that relate to breasts.

Exhibition History (CV)