Can you see me better now?
Fabienne Levy is pleased to announce Alina Frieske first solo show in Lausanne. Alina’s work can be seen as a new form of observation, where the artist takes images from the web to then reconstruct them in a totally new story. The artist manipulates the images the same way others manipulate the information.
‘Can you see me better now?’ is an investigation and recreation into how individuals are recognised and reflected in the virtual environment of the Internet. Thus, new narratives are envisioned.
The images brought together are based on every day smartphone photos from the endless pool of the web, which, cut out into smaller fractions, serve as a colour palette and brushstrokes. Alina aims towards a better understanding of the overall picture, looking from a distance. In their accumulated form, the photographic artifacts turn into collective portraits.
In times of extreme personalization and self-exposure, we constantly create updated versions of ourselves. The more we show, the more recommendations we receive and the better our profile is read from the outside. We begin to look solely at reflections and echoes from ourselves. Increasingly we lose track about the images we produce and the visual information that gets extracted by others. People become data and profiles. Profiles in turn will be re-categorized far away from their initial context. With reference to the pictorial history of portraits, the work questions the potential of photography for the imaginary, fictional and virtual.
The single image, detached from its fleeting life as scroll function behind the screen, is interpreted as part of a larger pattern. Put together, the images camouflage themselves in their mutual imitation.
Which contours remain recognisable and what blurs in the crowd? The work experiments the singular and the multitude, between the detail and the overview, asking what makes an individual and how precisely we want to be seen?
