Godspeed You (Requiem No.5)

Godspeed You (Requiem No.5)

£4,000.00

In the photographic series: “Godspeed you” I continue my ongoing obsessions with the transience of life and the inevitability of death. Permeated with a longing to capture –even fleetingly – the memories, perceptions and sensations of the human spirit, my works stage a constant conflict between transcendence and the ephemeral, inviting the viewer to contemplate the splendor, the exuberance and the intensity of life against the uncontrollable peripheral forces that inevitably shape our lives.

Drawing on the rich tradition of 16th and 17th Century Vanitas and Memento Mori paintings, the symbolic icons of the human skull and the red rose are combined to create both a literal and abstract symbolism suggestive of the futility of life whilst also consciously playing with the clichés of art’s own history.

The process of work is pure photography, I do not engage in any digital manipulation or enhancements and hence developed a unique photographic process of photographing the subjects.

The skulls appear to shift and move, appear and disappear into the deep, ink-black of the background - some with skulls alone, some combined with a visual explosion of deeply pigmented blooms. In so doing, my images lay question to the traditional expectation of the photograph in capturing an instant of time and space and instead addresses fundamental conundrums concerning optical perception, conception of time and the relationships between two-dimensional representation and objective reality.

In many ways these works look more to the tenets of painting than photography (I began my career as a painter) and this is accentuated through printing the images onto thick, matt fine-art paper and presenting them as a series of circular ‘Tondi’.

Year created: 2011

Medium: Painting

Size (H x W x D): 100 x 100 x 3 cm

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Artist Profile

Michal (Michaella) Cole

Michal is a London based multi-disciplined artist. Her work ranges from photography to paintings, sculptures, video and collages.

A graduate of Central Saint Martins college of art and design, Michal exhibited world wide and is a winner of the Scope Miami competition, The 2011 Signature Art awards and the noted Showdown competition at the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Michal’s work engages the themes of death, violence and beauty and is formed out of emotional and mental materials that have accompanied her throughout her life: pieces of memories, fragments of events, reoccurring sensations and perceptions both personal and global– "a relentless noise", as she puts it. From within all these emerges the "self" as a continuous arena of decomposing and recomposing. As such, Michal’s work is authentic: staring in the face of death on several occasions Michal’s perception and presentation is one of sublime beauty, yet its calmness and serenity is shadowed by a tense sense of violence. In her still life series-“Godspeed you” The skulls seems to appear and disappear, floating in a “black hole”- a liminal space: illusive, beautiful yet threatening. In some of the photos a color explosion of blooming roses appears while the skulls are transparent and faded.

Michal drawers her inspiration from renaissance art and the great masters using the circular presentation of the “Tondo” to symbolize the cycle of life and death, as well as the eternity, both the spiritual and the physical: Art as a form of permanence, of lasting beyond the body and time, and the preservation of ones existence and ideas. Her work process is notably one of pure photography. She does not engage in any digital manipulation or enhancements and hence developed a unique photographic process of photographing the subjects. This is in staying true to her concept of capturing “ a moment in time’ and the adaptation of Roland Barthes idea of the “Punctum”

Michal’s artwork provides a reflection on life, loss, destiny and chance. Allusions to the catastrophic violence of the everyday life as well as thoughts about global occurrences. As such, it reminds us of our past, present, and future, and, above all, the fragility of life itself.

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Godspeed You (Requiem No.5)