Portfolio Maria Vazquez Castel
Artist Statement We all have an instinctive inclination to transmit everything our senses meet into categories, into realms of previous knowledge, into our own realities. In transmission, however, the mind can lose the ability to imagine. But when the senses encounter what the mind cannot classify, imagination takes reign and the possibilities are endless. This is just what I want to ignite with my work -to break this connection between reality and the photographic image. Using digital and analog photography, I seek to create a disconnection between the objects in my photographs and reality. I often source images from the Internet, old photographs, or movies, and reconstruct them into pieces, which are remarkably different from the originals. The transformation itself is depicted in such a way that the viewer cannot know which image came first, allowing spectators to depend on their own raw intuition. It seems to me that the images are then assimilated at a deeper level, a level non-rational, non-verbal: as if this creates an effect in the fibers of the body which, although sometimes difficult to put into words, leaves no less a trace, an opening, a hint of desire... When the mind cannot rely on interpretations based on context, time frames or personal connection, imagination can thrive. As Einstein once said, “imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.� By breaking the comfort of surety and clarity I try to free the imagination of each spectator, allowing them to surmise all of the countless possibilities.
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UnFamiliar is an ongoing project that is an attempt to convey the paradoxical sensation of my experience of life in a foreign country (Korea). It is characterized by a mix between familiar and unknown. On the one hand is the routine that establishes a feeling of what is “normal� and on the other hand is the evidence of the difference that crystallizes at times in the chance encounter of a person or a situation that comes like spark and awakens a feeling of strangeness...
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The word ‘deuil’ (french word for ‘mourning’), which derives from the latin ‘dolus’ stump of ‘dolere’ (to suffer), means, in the 10th century, pain or affliction that we feel at the death of a loved one. From April 3rd to May 12th, during 40 days, I wore on me, in a small pouch in canvas under my clothes, the printed image of a photograph of my grandfather taken between his death and his burial. All this time I kept the bag on me (I slept with it, I showered with it, etc.). I only took out the image to scan it from time to time, noticing a sharp deterioration of its condition every time. The idea of this work is to materialize, in some way, the mourning: the fact that we think of the missing person regularly, and how this thought stays with us and, even if it is often put aside to be able to live (we are not going to spend all day crying), from time to time is remembered and sometimes we even give ourselves the time feel what this absence does inside us.
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This project raises the question of recognition. Fragmentation and framing change the meaning of what one sees, giving free rein to the imagination. These images are details of a film found on the Internet. Cropping and close-up allow a reappropriation of the original content, the decontextualisation of these details makes them undefined or abstract. The eye then seeks to combine these bits of image to something known. The deconstruction of form upsets the usual identification process therefore requires the work of another kind of organization that may call a more internal, intimate, and singular imagination exercise.
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Pornographic image shears and blurs the notion of intimacy. By exposing and unveiling every detail, it transforms it. Intimacy does not show itself the same way when facing the camera as in its usual secrecy. To expose itself, it shields itself with codes, masks and distorted faces. As a clown, pornography magnifies and distorts the actions of sexuality for stage and produce them... These images are made from pornographic videos found on the internet. By the deformation of the body, due to a long shutter time, they reveal strange chimeras. Some parts of the body disappear, others fuse... It is maybe in this blurry way, that the images lose their pornographic and explicit status to convey the mystery of everyone’s personal projections of intimacy.
S m a s h i n g G a m e s The idea behind this series is to abstract the image from its context to alter its meaning: by isolating details, gestures, by amplifying them through photography the image becomes a lie, an invention.
Images taken from these videos found on youtube: Guy smashes PS4 at Best Buy launch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXE_dTvMMg0 Smash My Xbox 360 - Short Version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1Ic3KsxqRo Smash My Cousins Xbox http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UWRDpQt6JE