Tuesday, October 16, 2012

layers of our own identity...



This work is very much not fiber based but it is oh so good. French born NY based artist Amelie Chabannes uses an incredibly gorgeous palette of building materials and mixed media to create installations/performances that are symbolically peeling the layers of identity.


Struck by the words of Gaston Bachelard and his comparison of the soul to a house - she began to build sculptures built of layers that she then slowly tears about as a metaphor for finding, searching, and revealing ones soul.



In one work she is inspired by a Jung quote, read the description from her website below:

In Contributions to Analytical Psychology C. G. Jung asks his readers to consider the following comparison.

“We have to describe and to explain a building the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tools are found and remnants of glacial fauna in the layers below. That would be a sort of picture of our mental structure”.

“Intimate immensity and Lagerstätten ” is a mixed media installation, which investigates the difficult and enduring task of capturing the depth of the human soul.

The project portrays the complexity of the being and its representations in specific philosophical and psychoanalytical analysis...The installation and performance will also evoke the conflict between the two psychic forces, the conscious and its fragile rationality opposed to the archaic and more intuitive unconscious.


Her work is complex and conceptual. For me the concept and references make the work even more compelling and moving. I have always been drawn to work that can manage to be highly personal and about human experience but also live in the aesthetic world of minimalism. But with all this said visually her work manages to say so much of it without any assistance, truly successful art then. 

 

Her newest work not only deconstructs her own identity but the influences she has.  Read about it here. 

  
I really hope to see her work in person someday and encourage any one who has not read Poetics of Space (the book of Bachelard she references) to read it.  It changes your world if you are an artist of any kind who considers space.

See more of Amelie's work here.

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