Susy Oliveira
Susy Oliveira, a Toronto-based multimedia artist, has been making a lot of online buzz with her photo-based constructions. Made from c-prints and foamcore, her works blend photography and sculpture, resulting in something that is at once imposing in its three-dimensionality and strikingly two-dimensional and angular.
Her photographs are mounted on each face of a volume to restore the third dimension to the image that was lost through the photographic process. In this way, Oliveira repurposes the images, giving them a new form and life. The result is a pixelated effect similar to that of video game characters or computer graphics circa 1980. The shape of the subject is therefore both simplified and amplified, creating something that is neither reality nor fiction, but somewhere in between.
For Oliveira, her sculptures represent one aspect of our modern obsession with replacing nature with fabricated, manmade versions of things, and with mixing the virtual with the real. These sculptures create their own virtual world that, like other virtual environments, is identifiably different than (but uncomfortably close to) reality.
For a look at Susy Oliveira’s other work, which includes more sculptures, paintings, and prints, click here.
