| In today’s (post) Society of the Spectacle, where a historical art approach has failed to process satisfactory reality and to generate dynamic forms of specific language, the need to question the status quo of the arts and the artist is essential. Attempting to understand the historical, cultural, and political context can lead to an awareness that can be the conceptual base for research, production, and artistic acquisition of knowledge. For me, the process of creation is a conscious and deliberate progression from start to finish. I begin to assemble aesthetic and ideological constructions by researching in a journalistic style. |  |
Simion Cernica
In today’s (post) Society of the Spectacle, where a historical art approach has failed to process satisfactory reality and to generate dynamic forms of specific language, the need to question the status quo of the arts and the artist is essential. Attempting to understand the historical, cultural, and political context can lead to an awareness that can be the conceptual base for research, production, and artistic acquisition of knowledge.
For me, the process of creation is a conscious and deliberate progression from start to finish. I begin to assemble aesthetic and ideological constructions by researching in a journalistic style. Working mainly with video/film, photography, installation, documented performance, but also with collage, painting, mixed media, and objects, I try to avoid Mannerism and common redundancies of the mediums.
When working with photography, I like to move freely without artificiality. I use the inner power of images from found or instant images that ask to be recorded. These images are also associated with ideas or concepts, which are carefully pre-selected or even staged visual constructions that reveal their own purposes on or through display, or require a conceptual combination of text.
I prefer simple film structures, impromptu street situations, or some times deliberately complicated narratives and performances executed for the camera, which are all filtered conceptually and reference art video and film history. I use mostly friends or strangers as actors, either recruited or found on the spot. In script-based video or controlled improvisation, I mainly focus on reenactments and post-YouTube aesthetics using recent or twentieth-century history, simplified or intensely repeated and exaggerated in order to refocus and challenge the viewer. I am currently working on a video series featuring some autobiographical and specific violent historical changes over the past 30 years in Romania and the U.S.
The whole journey of moving images gathers in episodes that seem to form parts of a bigger multimedia project or a personal video library divided on sectarian cinematic criteria that generate a continuous script.
My works, whether single, part of bigger installations, improvised, or created through the lengthy process of collecting information and processing artifacts, can be reduced to solitary symbols or connected to a broader ‘communication network’. This can, in turn, become of part of a (textual) construction that will remain alive and independent, taking the form of dry aphorisms or points of support for future trails.
