Akim Monet

Website

http://www.akimmonet.com

Relationship status

married

College / University

Cornell University, New York State

Member type

Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?

Photography

About my artwork

All the details in a scene are imprinted on a negative. As an Artist, I see a positive print as a reproduction, and a negative as the imprint of reality, the testimony of a micro-second. These thoughts coursed through my mind as I examined my negatives in the tranquil guest-houses at night in India, back in 1992. I was fascinated by the manner in which negatives reveal what the eye cannot see, the complement of what the eye does see. I tried to envision how light travels and gets lost. I marveled how black is the absence of light and white the sum of all colors. I tried to see how light travels through space and hits an object: some rays are absorbed and others reflected. The latter are those that allow us to see color; it is those that affect the emulsion on the celluloid. At this point, my thoughts get lost like the path of light. I cannot really follow what is reflected and what is absorbed.

It is the “space between” that I discovered in India, that space between the Ying and the Yang, between the sum of all colors and its absence. I found this space in my negatives. I proceeded to find a way to enlarge them in order to explore that magical gap.

Artists I like

Henri Matisse, Yves Klein, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andres Serrano

Centre of the artworld:

Berlin