Anne Cecile Surga ART Habens
Therefore when I am working on a specific idea, I try to reach and explore its deepest meanings, and all of the feelings associated with it in order to find the best formal way to express it.
In the human figure has been deformed into its simplest form, and it is standing alone, flabbergasted, with the impossibility to avoid the viewer’ s gaze, offering its vulnerability. The figure is not quite straight, its torso is slightly hunched to mark the pain it is feeling. It is shapeless and faceless so the viewer can identify to the figure as well as to the feeling of missing or loosing someone expressed here. The open heart carved out of the stone symbolizes the open wound and the feeling of losing one’ s heart when losing a loved one. The simplicity of the work here was chosen purposedly to allow the viewer to create a connexion to the work and to the feelings by getting rid of any visual impurity that could distract him from the subject.
That is a very good and interesting question, but I am not sure I can answer it! To me, my personal experiences have a direct impact on my work and they can also be a direct source of inspiration. Sometimes
I feel like anybody could read me and know my whole life by taking a look at my oeuvre, but the public’ s feedback tells otherwise.
If I think about it, I guess it is not entirely possible to disconnect the creative process from direct experience. According to science, our personallity- which has a direct influence on the career we opt for and other main life choices- is genetically inherited by 50 %. Let’ s say that an artist would want to create“ pure art” that is not tainted by exterior influences, something that would be pure creation, this is already contradicted by the fact that his very own personallity is already influenced by his personal genetics. So the way he sees the world, how he perceives it, how he expresses himself is already the outcome of his own experience. The work is about personal experience but also about the way we present it to create a super personality for the social media. In this work I was trying to denounce how much social media can distort the perception of the self for oneself and for the others. Selfies, perfect sunsets, filters, all of these play a part in a mise en scene to make us appear better than we actually are on social media. It made me think about the reasons behind why people do these things, the pros and cons of such behaviours. It was very interesting that during the process of creating the 50 self-portraits my reflexion toward the work changed as well. What first begun pretty much as a critique of the selfie matured into a reflection about who I am and which aspects of myself I can or want to display in 50 different ways. It was also quite interesting for me to reappropriate my own physical image, which is something I never really did in the past. The obvious disclaimer behind that work was to state that I am not my physical attributes, which is why the same portrait is printed over and over. I came to realize it was impossible to capture a person by making 50 different
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