On Waiting<\/a>, 2006<\/p>\nIn other of my projects I am photographing my dollhouse’s room, experimenting with the lighting and the position of the camera to create ambiguous spaces. The photograph shows a reality that was once in front of the lens, therefore distances us from it in time and space (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153That has been\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), but in this case, that reality was already a fake, a manipulable reconstruction of reality, the loss of sense of scale that the photograph produces increases the mystery of its existence and the possibilities of grasping and manipulating it\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6The stillness of the miniature space is multiply by the function of Photography that freezes the moment and existence of the object, offering a co-presence with its reality and inviting us to psychologically inhabit it.<\/p>\n
Part III<\/p>\n
In very close relation with this concept of psychologically inhabiting an image are the works of Saskia Olde Wolbers, which serve me to introduce the last part of my presentation, the moving image, and the license that this medium allows to create the most dramatic use of the fantasy element to talk about its absence.<\/p>\n
Based on true stories that are narrated at the same time as the camera moves through the miniature sets created by hand by the artist. Their materiality and fantastic resolution allows the viewer to enter the image and the illusion, but the voice-off narration remind us of their fragility as mental images, and the impossibility of entering the reality of the human psychology. All these images are representation of experiences that are un-representable or too abstract for us to experiencing them and they are reached only through imagination.<\/p>\n
Moving slightly within this area of moving image, or rather, expanding it, I would like to focus the medium of cinema. In cinema the whole concept of psychological inhabiting becomes more physically experience through the immersive character of attending to the cinema screen, but for this particular research I will concentrate only in the images. The next example I think is the most intelligent and yet crude and extreme use of fakeness and artifice to expose reality and the lack of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153magic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the world: Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter.<\/p>\n
All the extremely highly constructed scenarios where the movie develops its action are a metaphor on the untruth of the medium itself, cinema. Because they are inhabited by figures there is an intense dramatization of the action. And likely as happened with the snow globe pieces, when all these contradictions accumulate everything becomes alive .<\/p>\n
The director takes the license of not representing the drama in a realistic way; the movie represents emotions and the psychology of the characters and not the facts. The resulting images are full of ambiguous beauty; there is a tension between the artifice and the action. The aesthetics is the result of conscious and rational decisions to expose in a much more effective way the reality of human nature. This contrasts with the highly realistic way of representing drama in the rest of movies and the access through television to real dramatic events, because of the distance between the real action and the audience mediated through the screen, the boundaries between fact and fiction are blurred.<\/p>\n
As my last example for this research I would like to refer to the movie Nostalgia by Andrei Tarkovsky, because it sums up all the ideas I have talked about. It is a highly constructed scenario, inhabited by a character that through its still pose looks at us directly in the eye making us inhabitants of the image in a complicit way, and again its ambiguous and unsettling beauty talks about psychological depths.<\/p>\n
After having looked at all these works, there are huge similarities in relation to each other and in relation with my own practise. Their constructed fictiveness highlights the emotional character of the events staged or in the case of Vija\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s drawings and in the works where there are no figures, the metaphysical meaning of the place and the symbolism of the landscapes. There is a feeling of an almost desperate attempt to represent and reproduce the un-representable, to make the imagined become real. Their inconsistent existence is redeemed with their uniqueness and humanized fragility. The drawing, the miniature and the theatrical sets all remain tragically remote and unreachable in their display exposure.<\/p>\n
They all use the technique of constructing and fabricating unreal worlds; creating images that produce pleasure in an unsettling way, to make us feel guilty for admiring its beauty. The narrative is fragmented giving room for the viewer to imagine and project itself into the picture, but this inhabitancy of the image is an abstract experience, as any fantasy or fictiveness experience in general, and it is only known through representation, there is no original. That is what I seek to explore in my own practise, to create a parallel between the promise of perfection enclosed in these constructed images that can never be fulfilled, and the isolation and imperfection of the world that surround us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This article is the research I undertook during the MA in Contemporary Fine Art. The topic of this essay is the relationship between fantasy and reality, and the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hondartzafraga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hondartzafraga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hondartzafraga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hondartzafraga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hondartzafraga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hondartzafraga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hondartzafraga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hondartzafraga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hondartzafraga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}