The key in my work is
the wish to shape that moment of real elements, usable objects. I want to
remind everyone that their bedroom from home, the notes on the refrigerator or
the wine stains on the carpet are all “art” and more than that, gathered
together, reflect our privacy, a mirror of our thoughts. How else
can you better represent “a moment of life”?
 |
| Journey at Constanta, 2017 |
As a painter,
I started to consider photography as a medium to express myself when I was exploring the idea that "art is life itself". This idea would soon become my calling.
I did my first
photography project, ÉTANT DONNÉS – STEALING LIFE FROM TODAY in 2015. There is a lot to say about it, so I will reserve a separate blogpost about it in the future.
Focus on the setting
Since then, a
huge interest was allocated on making costumes and objects – quite an ambitious
setting for the future shootings. Elements that otherwise I was used to paint
with – were reshaped now into 3D; most of the new objects are being painted as
well. I was using them to define an imaginary world: my interpretation of life on the Ogygia island, the place where in Mythology, Ulysses met Calypso and
spent seven years with her.
I embarked on a journey to add layers of complexity to myself, taking photos and short videos with different costumes, until it shaped up into an alter ego. This hasn't yet become a project on it's own, but rather a component of the 3D HOTEL iterative project.
 |
| From left to the right: picture with the character in her natural ambient (Ogygia Island), picture with the character in the hotel room, the installation ”Frozen with liquid” from 3D HOTEL exhibition, Regensburg, 2017 |
3D HOTEL vs MY ALTER EGO
Instead of
admiring art from a safe distance, with 3D HOTEL visitors can immerse
themselves in the artwork and experience it with all their senses. A hotel
room, with pieces of furniture on which art objects are placed, is the best
host for my project. Each time it is exposed, it takes another form, according
to the new space. The visitors are invited to investigate the ‘crime scene’,
flip through files with evidence, and try to understand who the main character
was, and what happened to her. All around, they can see pieces of evidence of
the clothes she wore and the prints that she left in the room. The glass that
she drank from, the book next to her bed, the dress that she wore, covered with
cement. Even the ceiling carries her personality, and it seems like in her
short stay at the hotel, the impersonal room transformed, and became a mirrored
image of the investigated character. The room contains incomplete pieces of
evidence.
Below is a brief history of my 3D HOTEL iterative project.
 |
|
|
It might seem like all the photoshoots done so far with my alter ego and the works from 3D HOTEL belong to the same project, but they do not. Much like in Constantin Brancusi's work of mobile groups, all my projects are linked, and part of a flexible network that constitutes my artistic world. The
element-projects from a group can be anytime regrouped in a different formula
and still make sense. In other words, my artistic process could be explained
like an infinite spiral, never ending but continuously growing.
Alter Ego photos, 2016
Alter Ego photos, 2018
An amazing experience. My first participation to a photo show
In 2018, I've participated in the COLD CASES workshop organized by Natasha Caruana. She invited Juno Calypso to tell us about her artistic process, research and other tips. To get advice from this two brilliant fine art photographers, added a new layer to my understanding of this fascinating domain in which I gradually started to get involved more and more. Both Juno and Natasha curated the Cold Cases exhibition at the Old Police Cells Museum in Brighton. We imagined new solutions for unsolved crimes. I made a couple of artworks, keeping my alter ego in mind, forever present in my art photography since I created it.
Cold Cases was an exhibition with 19 other artists from
Europe, South America and Australia. The complexity of the project lies in the theme proposed, the variety of interpretations and the amazing exhibition space. We reinterpreted three famous Brighton
crimes found within the Old Police Cells Museum collection: The Trunk Murders,
the Chocolate Creme Killer and the Grand Hotel
Bombing.
As our show
was part of the Biennale of Photography in Brighton 2018, Natasha Caruana was
invited to give a speech about Cold Cases at the Phoenix art center in Brighton. Natasha spoke about the representation of
women today, a contested sight across film, advertising imagery, and fashion
campaigns, where women’s stories are too often portrayed as singular and
passive, their bodies brutalized inside the frame. (Read more here: https://www.work-show-grow.com/events/).
Presentation of the Grand Hotel Bombing Crime.
Picture taken at the Old Police Cells Museum.
Presentation of the Grand Hotel Bombing Crime.
Picture taken at the Old Police Cells Museum.
Sketch of Maggie, "solving the Grand Hotel Bombing crime", 2018.
My approach to the three crimes was to portray the woman as the killer and not the
victim. I created this project based on the hypothesis that all three crimes had
a common point. I used the fictional character present in almost all my photography projects, to create a new form of
reality. What if the woman who had been cut into pieces to fit into a trunk
wouldn’t have died? Was Margaret Thatcher’s fear during her stay at the Grand
Hotel in Brighton only triggered by the bomb? Her diary from that period
investigated by a doctor might have contributed to a diagnosis of
severe paranoia and delirium. She was wondering if there, in that city, the sea
was awakened to life. After all the years in which the case was abandoned, that
old trunk is covered by unprecedented vegetation. Nor did the poisoned object
belonging to Christiana's mother remain unchanged. It may seem that time has
covered all these crimes, but is it so? For this last crime I have created a photography of a domestic object (Christiana’s mom teeth) placed between poison
bottles. Popularly known as “The Chocolate Creme Killer”, she was killing
people in the handiest way for a woman in those times: by poisoning. Once she
got the taste for killing, her home become a laboratory. I have chosen to focus
on the beginning of her story, when she was living with her old sick mother
that she had to take care of. Could her mother have accidentally gotten poisoned
as well, living in a small flat surrounded by poison bottles?
 |
Maggie, colour photograph, dimensions variable, 2018
Contemporary news report. Image from the Old Police Cells Museum.
Poison 11, colour photograph, dimensions variable, 2018
The bedroom of 47 Kemp Street, Brighton, where Violet Kaye was found
murdered by Tony Mancini, 1934. The trunk which contained her remains
is pictured.
Picture with the remains of Violet Key in the trunk.
  |
After the experience with Cold Cases, the development of my alter ego drove me to different short projects. One
of them is an action work called From Painting to Life and the
most recently finished one is a painting called Ogygia.
From
Painting to Life is how I visually explained the connection between 3D Hotel and this very special and intimate work that portray my alter ego. From time
to time I love taking some steps back and going to the original thoughts and
notes. Then, I come back more detached, able to create something that reveals my intentions very clearly. I have started talking about the ”life” element
that photography helped me bring into the artistic process of a painter. An action work pointed this out even more. If a photography can be defined as an
instantaneous moment of life, like a millisecond caught for eternity, a performative
work is something that no camera can evoke. Only by being present in that
specific moment, by seeing the movements with your eyes and by hearing the whispers, the breathing and the steps of the artist with your own ears, you can fully immerse yourself in the art piece. This is the path that I have walked on to reach for also becoming a performer, debuting with the work From Painting to Life, at Chaosmos, in
Athens, April 2019.
From Painting to Life, performance, Chaosmos, Athens, 2019
Preparing the setting fot the From Painting to Life performance, Chaosomos, Athens, 2019.
People saw the performance from the rooftop, through the window and door.
During
this action work, I give people a peak into the world of a painter. My art
brings together colour (the traditional element of painting) and time
(representative for other media such as video, that are not conventionally
characteristic for painting). The concept is a so called
"performance" where you can experience a painter in a show-window "on
a stage", in a created context: an image that reveals an environment
from the artist's intimacy. This allows the viewer to enter for a few minutes
in the mind of a creator, and implicitly in the middle of an artwork.
Later,
in 2019, I have finished the Ogygia painting, that I have started to work on a year before. This painting "has waited" on my studio’s wall and ceiling while
I prepared the 3D HOTEL London exhibition, recorded the sound for my first
performance and worked on many other projects. It’s been like ”painting” waited for me to come back
to her. I always enjoy coming back to painting. It reminds me who I am!
In
other words, if my artistic process would have been a circle, this circle, starting from
the Ogygia island, would have ended with this huge painting, that was a burden on my
shoulders (in a very good way), being hosted in my studio all this time. But as I
have said already, it is a spiral, not a circle, so it doesn’t end here. It doesn’t
end at all. It always gets a new shape, but it is never done.
So,
let’s go back to photography in my artistic process, because there are some
more projects that I’ve done in this direction since the ÉTANT DONNÉS – STEALING LIFE FROM TODAY from 2015, that I would like to tell you about.
Constellation on the Skin, 2016-2018
Constellation
on the Skin is one of them. It was born from a thought that once passed
through my mind. I was in a bathtub full of water, washing my hair. With my
mind empty, I was looking at the many beauty spots on my chest. I saw an entire
universe with tiny stars shining. It was 2016. After shooting those fragments
of my skin, they soon became an installation with 19 pieces of 113 x 42 cm
each.
I
worked then to find a way of preserving this "constellation" moment from the
bathtub untouched by the passing of time. As a metaphor, I placed each
photography between the two layers of a Thermopane window. Since then, 16 skin
constellations have become imortal. Over the glass surface, are drawn imaginary
constellations as some "vectors" of transition: broken lines connecting two points.
The three pieces on the left play a very important role for the entire installation. They are traditional linen canvases – collage and painting. The feathers can
be touched and the painting does have a particulare smell. Neither touch or
smell can be kept frozen in a piece of glass. Only the photographs are under glass, because they are the only ones that can be kept frozen.
Before
this, at the beginning of 2016, while I was in Mulhouse with a scholarship, I worked
on two distinct projects, Sidonie and A Wall. Introspection, walking on the
streets and analyzing the self was what I did then for both projects. I realize now, that this experience crystalized into the foundation of my alter ego.
IELE, iterative project
Sometimes
I love creating mixed media artworks and combining various artistic mediums. A good example
for this is the iterative project IELE, which had two different shapes so far,
both containing the series of photography Caught in the mirage of remembering. It is a series of five selfportraits wearing my mother's wedding dress.
In the first place, the five lightboxes were displayed in a circle, on the walls of a round room. The space between them was consistent, giving the viewer the idea of an infinite circle, of immersivity, of unpalpable, of shadows. One year later, I created the opposite sensation, by displaying the same lightboxes in a very tight circle. I called this last piece
In the first place, the five lightboxes were displayed in a circle, on the walls of a round room. The space between them was consistent, giving the viewer the idea of an infinite circle, of immersivity, of unpalpable, of shadows. One year later, I created the opposite sensation, by displaying the same lightboxes in a very tight circle. I called this last piece
Memory
Sequences –
Flashbacks from the heart of the forest. It is an interactive installation which has just enough space for one person to step inside. On one hand, there is no space for reflection, for thinking, and on the other hand, it is an individual experience thanks to which you face
the portraits of the "Iele" up close. The "Iele" are Romanian mythological characters that make groups of 3, 5 or 9. These young beautiful nimphs dance in circles in the forests. It is said that in the night of 23rd of June, they seduce men and then hurt them.
Once you get the taste, you never leave it behind
To
get to a conclusion, since I felt the taste of photography, I never stopped
introducing it into my art installations in very different ways. I just adore to
put myself in different situations, and to experience each through my own
spectrum and reflections.
Comments
Post a Comment