everyday

The Everyday and the Uncanny

When surrealism is generally spoken about, it seems to be the great masterpieces from Dali that spring to mind. I, however, wanted to take on a different role with my images and create subtlety on a higher level, by which I mean create portraits or a simple subject composition that is no stranger to the eye but I would be changing one thing ever so slightly to gain the ‘look twice’ effect.

Surrealism, to me is (the same as the original terminology) juxtaposition; I pick up no other meaning than normal, plausible objects arranged or placed together to create a situation that seems eccentric and not at all plausible due to the objects original nature.

In researching my idea further, I looked towards Man Ray, his work with Rayographs and his photographs of Kiki and other models. He way he used the camera to capture an obscure composition. I looked a lot at Duane Michaels. In a selection of his work, he incorporates mirrors into the composition along side his subjects. The mirrors he uses are bent or dented in some way that the subject’s faces, upon looking into them get very distorted: this work really caught my eye and brought me to thinking of where I then got my idea. One aspect of the everyday for me, would be looking into the mirror and readying myself to look, in my eyes, ’presentable’ for the world around me (as many of us do). This applies to the leopard print curtain as well; it is a fashion print at the moment and fashion is another big part of me.
Rene Magritte’s approach to surrealism is fascinating, the below text explains;

“A consummate technician, his work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe, This is not a pipe (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. Magritte pulled the same stunt in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these Ceci n’est pas works, Magritte seems to suggest that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself, per se, as a Kantian noumenon, but capture only an image on the canvas.” [www.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Magritte]

The last line of the paragraph is most relevant to what I decided to do with my ideas. I chose three works by Magritte to reenact: La Magie Noir, Les liaisons and the third I am not sure of the name but it has the ‘Magritte figure’ looking into a mirror and seeing what the artist sees, the back of his own head. The reason I am using mirrors throughout my work is this idea of looking, that is why we all have mirrors and that is what we do with them. Mirrors tell us exactly what we look like, the duplicated image, but only here the mirror already lies. We see the flipped image when we look at ourselves, and it is this idea I wanted to concentrate on, is what we see always the truth? I used my environment and belongings to keep the images subjective.

The creation involved me using a tripod and timer function to get the look I wanted. The first image, were I blend in with the curtain in front of the window, I took the shot, and then separately shot the curtain so as I could blend it over the top of my body to give a camouflage appearance.
The second image was straightforward but difficult to achieve. I knelt before the mirror, making sure to place other objects beside me so when I cut and pasted myself into the mirror, it was more obvious what was being done because my reflection was wrong, but the other banal objects reflection were correct.

The third and most effective in my opinion I shot myself holding a small circular mirror in front of my chest, I then took an image of my back separately and pasted it into the circular mirror in the before image.

I hoped for minor, subtle alterations that I feel have been achieved, however, I think a larger series would be more effective to get the full intention across via these images.