LandE scape
Christin Bolewski
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
LandEscape meets
Christin Bolewski
An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Barbara Scott, curator landescape @ europe. com
Exploring the expressive potential of a wide variety of materials, artist Christin Bolewski ' s work explores cross-cultural influences between the West and the East and considers the vital relationship between direct experience and visual interpretation, to draw the viewers through a multilayered journey. In her Shizen? Natural that we ' ll be discussing in the following pages she encapsulated both traditional heritage and unconventional sensitiveness, to trigger the viewers ' perceptual parameters. One of the most impressive aspects of Bolewski ' s work is the way it accomplishes the difficult task of questioning Western digital visualisation practice that intends to represent realistic space: we are very pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating and multifaceted artistic production.
Hello Christin and welcome to LandEscape: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. You have a solid formal training and after your studies in photographic engineering and jewelley, you later joined the Academy of Media Arts Cologne as a postgraduated student, focussing on Video, Sound and Installation: how do these experience influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself to the aesthetic problem in general?
I would describe myself as a digital media artist and experimental filmmaker. When I was 20 and went to University I first started working mainly with analogue photography, film and video. Since then my practice has evolved and developed alongside the development of digital and lens-based media. Academy of Media Arts in Cologne was a good place to experiment with digital technology in the early 90s when these tools were still very expensive and access to technology for an individual artist was very difficult. Specifically digital manipulation and collage of image and sound became a very important process in my work at the same time I was missing to work with real materials in my hands hence I also worked with jewellery for a while. I started exploring digital animation and manipulation techniques to recreate cinematic language and to bring some of the material and haptic qualities of analogue process into the digital as I did not like the clean look of it. I also aimed to develop new innovative principles of montage and collage in time-based narration which was possible through the digital process. I love to change and make abstract the content, tonality, expressivity of images and sound through the process of digital collage, filtering and processing. I aim to reduce and reinterpret the information of the original footage to create distinctive artwork, which articulates my individual viewpoint.
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