Simone Stoll
Visual Artist
Exhibiting:
#1 (hottest pink)
Medium: video
Dimensions: Original 15:35, Shortcut 7:27
On participating in Vagina Festival 2008:
#1 (hottest pink)’ shows a close-up on hands varnishing toenails. The camera is fixed and frontal. This intimate moment of (female) beauty care reveals body, body culture, but foremost, a mental state. The slow and repetitive act turns into excessiveness, beautification into self-violation. The onlooker becomes witness of this private moment, of somebody’s open and raw state of being; becomes aware of fragility that lies within our existence.
Artist Statement:
Body and mind are interwoven, in all my works, whether in
painting, drawing, photo or video. My first paintings showed naked women in urban landscapes, screaming out their pleasure and pain, confrontational stripped naked, sexual and provocative. There is a certain energy and boldness that has gone lost within the course of becoming an artist, a feminine side that had given way to abstraction.
My work is based on the human, nourished by the neurosciences, socio-cultural studies and the arts. I seek to keep my means simple and direct, base my ideas on my experience, my intimate understanding, mind, sensuality. I always use my own body as a model, performer. The feminist approach is part of my general understanding, a constant re-questioning.
Living in different countries taught me seeing and thinking in all kinds of ways. Within different societies, I have been confronted with variations of feminist understanding and society’s general attitude towards the feminin concept. Adaptation is a learning process going from shovelling in of the new and burying of the old until the latter seeps back through and asks to be reconsidered. I reconsidered.
My search on body and life could no longer be separated from sexuality; my work became increasingly sensual and erotic, raw and cruel. There was also a need for the ‘real’ body image beginning with the body-prints ‘Loveletters’, leading to photography and video. These pieces are poetic and tender, cruel and raw. They allow me a direct confrontation with the public mirroring mental states of being, expressing longing and solitude, sensuality and desire, despair and destruction, hope and love.
Contact: simonestoll@free.fr
Website: www.artreview.com/profile/simonestoll
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Vagina Festival is presented entirely by volunteers. We keep expenses low and produce the event with the help of generous sponsors. Please join us in creating a space for conversation.
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