Featured Artist, Michelle Gevint, talks about her artistic process and inspiration behind her work, which examines personal and social relationships to architectural spaces and built environments. Her most recent projects include ‘The Sweet Stench Of Sulfur’ and ‘22.5 degrees of possibility’.
My thought process is usually triggered by a 2D image and formulates over time into multi-layered experience such as collage, moving image and installation. I’m drawn to places of duality and contradiction such as liminal spaces or spaces in transition. I often integrate fact and fiction to create a new narrative that gives access to engage with more abstract concepts. My two most recent works have been in the form of video.
In the film ‘The Sweet Stench Of Sulfur’, the narrative centers around a current natural disaster happening in the Dead Sea in the form of sinkholes. The film examines human interaction with nature and how nature reclaims itself through natural disasters.
The film introduces the phenomenon of sinkholes on a macro factual informative layer, while delving into a micro psychological consciousness. I do this through an array of methods such as collage style editing, sound and the use of different mediums, such as 8mm film, HD, animation and drone footage. Creating a fragmented dreamlike interpretation of the natural disaster provides an entry to critically engage with difficult concepts such as global warming. Each medium adds a different perspective – the drone shots create a sense of disorientation of the landscape. The viewer at times cannot assess the size and perspective. The 8mm film adds an element of time by evoking a sense of the past. I use the surreal atmosphere to create an entry point for any viewer and remove it from its specificity and locality by making it more universal, experiential and visceral.
