Not-So-Ordinary Madness: Charlotte Colbert's Surrealist Photo Prisisms Delve Into the Parody of
'If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera’ - photographer Lewis Hine once quipped. Language, spoken or signed, is used to convey a message.. and where the humble English word fails, imagery finds its strength. In 2015, the Oxford Dictionaries, a global leader in matters of language, selected an emoji as its word of the year - a further testament to ever the complex nature and status of language in our 21st century. This occurrence also surely raised some intriguing questions: is the emoji becoming a substitute for and an invasion of personal expression? Or are we in the midsts of a digital revolution that transcends lingual limitations and cultural differences? Ordinary Madness examines this familiar query - through a series of black and white photographs, Charlotte Colbert’s naked female subjects find see their own human countenances replaced with a digital emoticon while playing on the peril of miscommunication.
The genesis of the idea for the show started when the child of one of her friends saw a butterfly on a window and tried to zoom into the creature to try and make it bigger. Herself a new mother to a baby girl, she thought about how we technology relates to us on a human level and how it has become as perfunctory as eating and drinking. Colbert explains that she started thinking of civilisation in the developed world as parodies of emoji families, she says, “There’s something wonderful about technology but something very dark. We’re coming back to a symbolic way of writing but it’s someone else’s interpretation.”
Using props, distorting mirrors, costumes as well as long and double exposures, Colbert creates a surreal parody of daily life as seen through twenty-first century language. Nude figures unable to connect, couples frozen in a forced state of feeling, a surreal army of circuit board women, an emoji wasteland where madness, fantasy, comedy and chaos coexist.
What are the advantages to using film as an artistic tool? Why do you choose film rather than other mediums?
I love stories and explore them through both narrative films and photography. I am passionate about both. They feed into each other, one inspiring the other or starting a questioning which can be further investigated in either medium. As a film director, the seeing and taking of photographs has influenced my aesthetic –one being the continuation of the other, both existing within my same world.
What is the effect of using black and white imagery throughout your films? What does the lack of colour reveal about you as an artist?
It is said that babies when they are just born see the world in black and white. Perhaps unconsciously I am striving towards that kind of immediacy with the world? It also probably allows for me to have a distance with the work, where I feel I can see it more clearly because through its color it is somehow separate from me.
Does being a female filmmaker influence your work? Does it give you a niche when promoting your work?
Being a female is one of the elements that makes up my identity and as such I am sure it influences how I perceive the world but it seems to me that what we tend to identify as feminine and masculine qualities can be found in either sex. For example Kathryn Bigelow’s films feel perhaps more “masculine” than Krzysztof Kieslowski’s.
This article is a taster from After Nyne's Issue 10 The Eve of the Avant Garde - for the full interview, you can purchase or download the issue here
Ordinary Madness runs from 1 July — 13 August 2016 Address: Gazelli Art House, 39 Dover Street, W1S 4NN
www.gazelliarthouse.com
