Artist reference – Still images

Carolle Benitah

Benitah is a French visual creator UN agency worked for 10 years as a dressmaker before turning to photography in 2001, exploring memory, family and therefore the passage of your time. usually pairing recent family photos with skilled worker accents, like embroidery, beads and ink paintings, Benitah seeks to reinterpret her own story as a girl, married woman and mother.

By activity totally different faces and options, the folks photographed are nearly stripped of their identity. I selected to check Benitah as a result of I believe his art best represents the construct I hope to capture during this project.

With beads, coloured thread and scissors, French photographer Carolle Benitah has altered her family photo albums to explore the memories of her childhood, and as a way to help her understand her current identity.

Carolle herself has said:

I started to be interested in my family pictures when I was leafing through a family album and found myself overwhelmed by an emotion of which I could not define the origin.

These photographs were taken 40 years earlier, and I could not even remember the moments they were shot, nor what preceded or followed those moments.

But the photos reawakened an anguish of something both familiar and totally unknown, the kind of disquieting strangeness that Freud spoke about. Those moments, fixed on paper, represented me, spoke about me and my family, told things about my identity, my place in the world, my family history and its secrets, the fears that constructed me, and many other things that contributed to who I am today.

I decided to explore the memories of my childhood to help me understand who I am and to define my current identity.

To begin, I carry out “excavations”. Like an archeologist, I dig out the pictures in which I appear from family albums and the shoe boxes full of photographs. I choose snapshots because they are related to memories and to loss.

These photographs are fragments of my past. I interpret them from a subjective perspective as confessions. I order them, classify them, scan them, then I print them. I don’t do anything directly on the original photo; I transpose this reality on a different paper. Sometimes I crop a detail that calls out to me, and I choose my format. The work of interpretation begins with these steps.

Once these choices of images are made, I start to tell my version of the story. I turn my attention to my own history, sometimes with 40 years of distance and the life experiences that changed my perception of events. The past of a human being, unlike the remains of an antique temple, is neither permanent nor finished, but reconstructed in the present time.

For the next step, I add needlework: embroidery and beads.

Embroidering is primarily a feminine activity. In the past, the embroiderer was seen as a paragon of virtue. Waiting was tied to this activity: women embroidered, hoping for the return of the man to the home. Embroidery is intimately linked to the milieu in which I grew up. Girls in a “good family” used to learn how to sew and embroider — essential activities for “perfect women”. My mother embroidered her trousseau.

There is nothing subversive about this activity, but I pervert it with my purpose.
I use its decorative function to re-interpret my own history and to expose its failings.
The two activities — interpretation and needlework — come together again in a kind of dispute: embroidery is the sign of a good education yet the words that I speak don’t show me to be what I was supposed to be: a well behaved girl, a wise spouse and a loving mother.

With each stitch I make a hole with a needle. Each hole is a putting to death of my demons. It’s like an exorcism. I make holes in paper until I am not hurting any more.

– Carolle Benitah

Benitah’s work is linked to ours as both share the nature of images hand-composed to tell a story or present an idea through embroidery

Louise Bourgeouis

Louise Bourgeois was a French-born sculptor best known for her monumental abstract and frequently biomorphic sculptures that deal with men and women’s interactions. She was born December 25, 1911, in Paris, France, and died May 31, 2010, in New York, New York, United States.

Bourgeois’ early sketches were created to aid her parents in the restoration of antique tapestries. She received her education at the Sorbonne, where she majored in mathematics. She switched her concentration to art at the age of 25, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and Fernand Léger’s studio, and in 1938 she married and returned to New York City with her American husband, art historian Robert Goldwater. She started displaying her surrealist paintings and engravings there. She began experimenting with sculptural forms in the late 1940s, making a series of long, slim wooden figures that she displayed single and in groups.

Those were the first of her autobiographical pieces, which were characteristically abstract but emotionally strong. In the decades that followed, she created a number of frequently unnerving settings out of latex and found materials, as well as constructions out of marble, plaster, and glass. Betrayal, anxiety, revenge, obsession, anger, unbalance, and loneliness are among the most common. She frequently revisited subjects, techniques, and forms that had previously piqued her interest. Because she refused to confine her creative output to a single style or medium, she became more difficult to label and remained on the periphery of the art world. She was given a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1982, an honor rarely bestowed on a living artist, and she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1993. She was awarded the Praemium Imperiale medal for sculpture by the Japan Art Association in 1999.

Long into her 90s, the sculptor maintained her vibrancy and originality. She constructed a massive steel-and-marble spider (Maman, 1999) from which six monumental bronze counterparts were cast in 2003, and the bronzes were shown at various locations across the world. Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress, and the Tangerine, a documentary, was released in 2008. Her house and studio, as well as a neighboring town house in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, were opened to the public in 2016 as a museum commemorating her life and work.


Art analysis

Louise Bourgeois is an artist that implements her own life struggles and thoughts into physical art.

Substance:

This project was clearly created using physical works like wood, linen, thread, metal and more

This artefact is stored in a museum for the public to see.

This is called “Cell of Hysteria” and Louise states that in this exhibition

Composition:

The key focus of the project is obviously the sculpture sort of hovering over the bed which has “Je t’aime” stitched through ought.

The artist has also added an antique sewing machine in this exhibition.

The dominant colours here are grey and red, successfully suggesting dark and gloomy times that have come upon Louise.

Lighting:

In this exhibition, the lighting is set towards the sculpture; powerfully drawing the viewers attention to the dis-membered sculpture.

There are a variety of lighter tones across the model, which provides better illumination for the sculpt to concentrate on, resulting in a precisely exposed cut

Techniques:

Embroidery has evidently been used to stitch the word s “Je t’aime” repeatedly

Atmosphere:

This form makes me feel empathetic because of the following:

the sculpture is dis-membered. This suggests that Louise is slowly getting rid of a memory of someone, considering the bump on the carve we can powerfully see that she’s attempting to “kill” the memory of a man. I know this because she repeatedly has called herself the murderer for this exhibition.

Also, “Je t’aime” is repeatedly stitched throughout the bed in which the sculpture is lying powerfully suggesting that the memory of this man (her husband who passed away) is killing slowly killing/ hurting her, nonetheless she still loves her husband. This is suggested by the fact the sculpture is only missing bits of its body like head, arms, and feet successfully showing the slow “murderous” process of getting rid of a memory.

One thought on “Artist reference – Still images”

  1. To achieve more marks, select one key image and analyse in depth using matrix of Technical>Visual>Contextual>Conceptual. Include references and points of view from others (ie art critics/ historians/ journalists or the artists herself)

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