Denitsa Stoyanova
Shifting Spaces, 2022
Installation of Photographic Giclée Archival Prints on Hahnemühle Fine Art Paper
Dimensions varied
The project is influenced by personal experiences of place attachment, the unconscious, and multimodal mental imagery. It is a visual depiction of dreams, evoked by the feeling of nostalgia for home, childhood, and family. Fundamental to the series, is recalling and restoring memories of sensations aroused by textures, objects, scents or flavours inherent in a specific place, and their metaphorical portrayal.
Pinhole photography and camera movement is used to distort the image and create atmosphere of the nostalgic dream, to represent the passing of time and our inability to slow it down or to stop it; the constant rivalry with it, to just grab a little more from the world, to experience, to see, to focus and stay in that moment and in that situation, and the dreadful feeling of irreversibility. My camera comes between me and the subject of my nostalgia, but just like time, it won’t stop its movement.
The work is influenced by Monet in moving away from actuality through painterly effects, by Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon’s way of delineating emotion, consideration of intimate spaces in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, films of Andrei Tarkovsky and the surrealist elements in Lee Miller’s Portrait of Space.