| Alice Anderson gazes into a fairy-tale mirror to question her past and her identity. She constructs “Freudian Tales” from situations or objects that recall her childhood, and awaken violent emotions within. Under a seductive and smooth appearance, her images speak of the cruelty of her family. In her photographs Screen Memories, she uses her imagination to dress up her childhood memories. The photographs act as screens—protective screens as well as projection screens.With a cinematographic device, the artist gives the images a dream-like unreal dimension, drawing out the distortions inherent in memory recall. | _thumb.jpg "Image")
|
M. Jacquin
_resizel.jpg "Image")
Alice Anderson, Immured, 2008. 2,000 meters of red hair. Courtesy of the artist.
Alice Anderson gazes into a fairy-tale mirror to question her past and her identity. She constructs “Freudian Tales” from situations or objects that recall her childhood, and awaken violent emotions within. Under a seductive and smooth appearance, her images speak of the cruelty of her family.
In her photographs Screen Memories, she uses her imagination to dress up her childhood memories. The photographs act as screens—protective screens as well as projection screens. With a cinematographic device, the artist gives the images a dream-like unreal dimension, drawing out the distortions inherent in memory recall. If Screen Memories are constructed artificial memories, her drawings, Blood Drawings, are traces of an intimate experience, created with the artist’s own blood.
Immured is an extremely disturbing piece. The 2,000 meters of red hair flying from the wall remind us of Rapunzel, a prisoner in a tower that has only one window. “[Immured] refers to a very precise period of my childhood,” Anderson said about the installation. “It’s about being shut in, and giving an image of something that I couldn’t say in words. Rapunzel represents a very specific part of the Grimm’s fairy tales, at least as I remember it. The young girl’s hair is her only link to the world until the day the witch cuts it off. Here the hair symbolizes the link between the child and the mother.”
Recently she decided to make a replica of herself, Puppet Master. She has created a 50-centimeter silicon doll made at Madame Tussaud’s in London, a sort of Mister Hyde who plays in her new tale films. In the films, The Idiot of Evenville, Prompt Book, The Woman Who Saw Herself Disappear, Bluebeard, and the Dolls’ Day, the artist describes the child’s fear of breaking with the past and the tearing that the separation engenders. The films portray the real and symbolic isolation that materializes in closed and oppressive spaces. Insomnia, a four-poster bed bathed in pink light, both seduces and disturbs. Its presence summarizes the message of the fundamental duality contained within fairy tales, and all that is at stake in Anderson’s work: behind the dreams and playfulness lies a bitter reality.
