Zsi Chimera's Page

Website

www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/stuart/StudentArt/ast_id/70411

College / University

Kingston University (Ba)

Program

Fine Art

Member type

Artist

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

Conceptual, Digital, Drawing, Event, Film, Installation, Painting, Performance, Photography, Sculpture, Video

I am...

a question

About my artwork

“...objects contain the possibility of all states of affairs”
Ludwig Wittgenstein


There is a momentarily space, a state of mind that happens directly before we recognise something, before we identify it with an already known phenomena.
Through the observation of ideas emerging in our mind, my aim is to capture the most peculiar and inexplicable. I am fascinated by the uncanny nature of subconsciously made associations. My intention is to share an experience of the unexpected with the audience, and also to inspire philosophical contemplation in the viewer through the medium of performance, collage and photography.

Since my first year at Kingston University I participated in a series of performance art workshops taught by Dagmar Glausnitzer-Smith. Here I became fascinated by the engagement with the present moment, the awareness of the now and discovered a level of concentration when another world opens up beyond the visible every-day reality. From the start I identified with Dagmar’s perception of live art as T.A.T.(meaning pure action). In 2005 in Edinburgh I documented Transitstation, a 24 hour exhibition as event that brought regional and local artists together to work alongside with artists with varying cultural backgrounds. My general outlook on life changed; I stopped taking preconceived ideas for granted and started to deconstruct traditional ideas about social and physical behaviour. This concept became the underlying force behind my artistic progression, which becomes apparent in my collage works also.

The first collage I made at the beginning this year came about accidentally when I was preparing images for screenprinting. At this time I was inspired by the concept of free associations as it appears in Freud’s psychoanalysis and in the technique of automaism practiced by the surrealists. I turned for intellectual and aesthetic guidance to Max Ernst for his purely uncanny collages, and to Joseph Cornell for his melancholy and nostalgia. I found novelty and freshness in juxtaposing seemingly unrelated objects such as musical instruments, old clocks and telephones, plants, cutlery and some parts of the human body... These compositions I put together from my own photographs as well as from found imagery and then I placed it onto a kind of mind field represented by the old pages of a found book.


Carrying on the observation of mental connection between ideas, since springtime this year, I started a collaboration with Alex Chase White ( Photographer and Performance Artist). We were both inspired by the the provocative work of chez photographer Jan Saudek and the novels of Milan Kundera. This collaboration focused on the relationship between Performance Art and Photography. The approach we have taken was the opposite of the traditional perception of photography as a mere documentation of performance. Our work became more theatrical, suggesting layers of meanings by the symbolism of objects present in the process of performing to the camera. Our intention is to raise the role of the photograph to a level when it goes beyond being a simple tool of documentation, but becomes a work of art in its own right.

My most recent work involves translating ideas and scenes from ancient greek myths into a visual language through performance/live art and photography. I have started to use a new method for this, by using phtographs to assemble a collage, and then feeding back this progressed image into photography again.

Artists I like

leonora carrington, max ernst, remedios varo, jan saudek, dorothea tanning, lajos horvath, rene magritte, gustave moreau, marina abramovic, dagmar glausnitzer-smith, andre breton, brian mccann, comte de lautreamont, alex chase-white, paul delmee, horst jansen...

The centre of the artworld is

another city

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http://www.artreview.com/profile/ZsiChimera
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