Anne de Vries
Monday, 24 May 2010
Work from his oeuvre.
“some thoughts about my work and interests
photography is not the same medium anymore as what it used to be. after you once pressed the button of your digital camera, you will need a computer instead of a dark room.
since the 90s digital photography became the mainstream mass medium of today. and an enormous overload of new photographs are exchanged over the internet everyday. if you work as an artist with the same medium you cannot avoid the question, why make more images if there are already so many? this question became central in my practice, through my work i try to find answers and formulate more questions.
when in the 00s digital photography got combined with the internet and mobile phone devices and the use of photography changed completely by which everything that is acknowledge as happening gets practically constantly mediated. we got to see how step by step the process of knowing becomes more and more collective and corporately extended to the whole of human society, and will turn into a huge contextualizing network.
next to this as an artist (working with photography but also other media like installation performance and video and animated gif) i intend create self aware images with their own meaning in which i generate and illustrate new ideas. these can be seen as a re-contextualizing network, using several media to question meaning, sometimes to replace or alter the stability of received historical or cultural facts. here i would like to quote arjan mulder from his book: – understanding media theory – he explains the following: – we do not use media out of a desire for direct contact with reality, or even a need for information. we seek surrender: we connect to media out of a desire for a direct experience of something that is not ourselves. we wish to experience ourselves as we are not. again and again, in different ways, with different media – (umt, pp. 67-68).
the idea of photography as a way – to experience the world as it is not, in different ways – is fascinating to me, transforming the known into an unknown unapproachable virtual reality that is able to contain an enormous power. based on capturing the world with a camera and secondary the endless possibilities that we find in digital image manipulation. why does this exist ? where is it used for ? how can this power tool be used to promote an artistic aim? in my work i am interested to involve an universe where freedom, naivety, wild fantasies, fetishism and detailed uncanny perversity collide with abstraction, semiotics, technology and slick technological perfection.
by re-contextualisatising i induce a shift in recognizable conventional codes of our visual culture. dealing in my photographs with the banalities of the real world while suggesting a clearly visual or hidden abstract alternate one. where balls entering a hole and exiting another, waves that remain motionless in a wild media ocean. where with simple methods semi naif or more complex scenario’s are created and distorted again. constructing a scene that triggers, a layered reading functioning as a document of a self aware reality and a portal to the imagination.” – Anne de Vries