Ana Bloom, PCA Photography Faculty, Exhibits at Lame Gallery
Artist and photographer Ana Bloom presents a new exhibition of her work – SOUFFLES.
Read Sandra de Vivies’s introduction of the exhibition:
The definition of Breath is “Air that you release by the mouth by exhaling with varied intensity.” It remains the Inspiration of the writer, of the artist, and energy that keeps people alive physically and spiritually in the relation to the cosmos. The next inhale chases the previous exhale, continually; do they play? In the matter of breathing we are all equal, each breath is counted. It really matters to count when it comes to breathing – no breath, no life. If the breath comes to lack oxygen, it urges you to do something very quickly. 24 seconds is the time of Samuel’s Beckett theatre play, « Breath ». The shortest of his plays, and the most seen as well. In it, breath is given representation, what for? Placed outside their natural habitat, the breath leaves the spectator outside the spectrum of reality.
The artist and photographer Ana Bloom uses the same trick of artificiality, the water replaces the stage in the role of the troublemaker. Here and there, the most common and universal human experience, breathing, takes all of a sudden a surrealistic dimension, questioning its own reason of being, of living, of existence itself. Restricted by the hostile environment the protagonists of this series of portraits, all from Marseille (France) are struggling for life. Having their heads under the water, they float as they can. Some people will see in that posture a metaphor of the harshness or even inhumanity of the human condition. This is a subject widely represented in Ana Bloom’s work who, as a young historian, devoted her university masters work to the expansion of social habitation in Paris. She later pursued it by studying Project Housing in the suburbs and the consequences to the natural environment which is eaten from every side in our modern societies. These women, these men, this little girl, « Blanche », who gives the first chromatic tone to the series of immersed portraits, are all very painting looking, they have a name, an identity, but their faces are blurred.
Humanity falters; there is distortion of the outlines, explosion of the pigments, a fine delicacy of the feature of the faces and aesthetics of the skin but it doesn’t give up.
In the cracks between surface and depth, the breath, peculiar to each human being, acts as a photographic filter. The bubbles modify the image of each individual in respect of their singular and peculiar adaptation under water. This is the part that voluntarily slipped out of the desire to control from the artist, a way to checkmate any kind of programming or temptation to make everybody look the same. In this diaphanous and meditative atmosphere, let’s not get mistaken by the silence that imposes itself like an act of resistance. A solar resistance. The human kind has long to live upfront; wounded, but not drowned.
Ana Bloom | SOUFFLES
Opening show: 21 January, 2016.
Galerie Lame
2, quai de la Joliette
13002 Marseille