Jamie Zill Senior Portfolio 2010-11: Artist

http://www.laurencedemaison.com

Galerie Esther Woerdehoff

http://www.ewgalerie.com/

REVIEW OF WORK

http://www.galeriebmg.com/revdemaison.html

BIOGRAPHY

These wonderfully quirky and artful photographs are not made with digital tricks. Laurence Demaison plays — delightfully — with film photography and with the idea of photography. Taking full advantage of showing what the camera sees (sometimes over long periods of exposure) compared to what the human eye cannot or does not see, she pre-visualizes each photograph up to a certain degree, and then lets chance and intuitive performance intervene.  As a result, her photographs seem to bend light and time, distort the appearance of her own human body, and hold secret coded messages in their multiple reflections, refractions, visual repetitions, and semaphore-like gestures that become smears of light in darkness.

Her technical virtuosity leads us to art that revels in the extremes of visual perception. Demaison’s photographs remind me of the distortions of Kertesz, the inventive playfulness of Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy, and the multiple perspectives of the Cubists — but her work is clearly her own.

-Jim Casper, lensculture.com

QUOTES

“Through the various series, she tries out the means which photography offers to dissimulate, to transform, to deteriorate her own image. There is in her work, a sensitive and singular course, almost obsessional. And her steps are perhaps a lucid and reflected search for identity whose complexity is only a sequence of questions, which Laurence Demaison is asking herself. She maintains an attraction-repulsion to her own body, which generates a strange fascination in the spectator. “

From a Press release, by Robert Delpire

http://www.ewgalerie.com/+TEXTS/PRESSE/Demaison_en.pdf

“The Indian saint Ramana Maharshi achieved enlightenment by asking “Who am I?” over and over. Demaison asks the same question, but not in words. Meanwhile, her body changes and ages. Her photographs become a journal of inquiry.”

Sparrow. "Damsel in Distress." Chronogram Magazine. Luminary Publishing Inc., 30

Apr. 2009. Web. 8 Feb. 2011.

Originally, Demaison worked with a model, but she eventually began taking photos only of herself, partly to limit expenses. "She doesn't feel that they're self-portraits at all," notes Bernard Gerson, director of Galerie BMG. "They're not about her. She's using the reflecting and distorting qualities of the water or the glossy paper to make phantoms, ghosts of herself. She disappears from the image."

Sparrow. "Damsel in Distress." Chronogram Magazine. Luminary Publishing Inc., 30

Apr. 2009. Web. 8 Feb. 2011.

The complexity and ambiguity of Laurence Demaison's work intrigues me. Her work is made up of self portraits, all of which her identity is stripped. She tells stories, evokes emotion, and forms an image of a being that is distorted, beautiful, repulsed, praised, and everything in between. She has the ability to make many out of one form, which is an idea I would like to continue with. A lot of the ideas that I wish to work with are personal, and yet I have not been able to find a way to make it objective. Demaison has successfully removed her personal identity from her work, while still allowing her ideas to flow through. Some of her work is beautiful, while other pieces are frightful, and evocative. I would like to experiment with creating images in a way that Demaison does, and possibly solidifying them on metal to tell a story that what has been done cannot be changed, yet all emotions and events create the being that you are today.