Let Your Eyes Dance

Stand with your legs apart. Bend forward.

Look back between your legs. Thank you.

Now look around and take stock of what you see.

The world has been stood on its head.

(István Örkény: “The grotesque (a practical approach)”; translated by Judith Sollosy)

In my work, I create fictitious constructions and compositions that deceive the eyes and invite the viewer to decipher them. Here, the photograph loses its functionality in the classical sense; its aim is not the decryption of the narrative. I examine the process of viewing the image and its guided reception while exploring the questions related to the media itself.

Everyday sights are combined into visual compositions that repeatedly question the monospatial nature of the image. I play around with tools of visual deception, for example, by creating a separate space and a new reality within the image via mimetic tools.

I raise questions related to the detailed study of the image within the image, the focus on the various layers of the photographs, and the recipient's intuition and creativity resulting from the context of the images. The simulacrum is generated by the representation of distorted proportions and the manual manipulation of the images. The superimposition of the various layers creates a three-dimensional space within the two-dimensional image. The manual manipulations blur or frame, highlight or hide objects, which, in effect, are crumpled, bent, and incorporated into real situations. As our gaze gets focused and shattered by these manipulations, our observation offers the possibility for decryption, and it makes us reflect on the process of creation as well as the structure of the image. These all direct our attention to the creative logic behind the photograph and remind us that we are looking at the photograph, and not the things photographed. We do not lose ourselves in the image, instead, we experience the way the photograph works.

With all the pictures we scroll through day by day, we hardly even know how each of them was created, and if they were altered digitally. My photographs make it possible to decrypt the creative method, which draws attention to which decisions make the chain of the idea, the creative process, and the presentation to create the final image.

Krystyna Bilak is part of Issue 17 by Guest Editor Torbjørn Rødland