ART Habens Art Review // Special Issue ART Habens Art Review | Page 73

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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