18 Oct - 01 Dec 2012
The Empire Project presents Dutch artist Cindy Jansen's "With Love" series. The exhibition can be seen at the gallery from 18 October till December 1.
Cindy Jansen (1976), works and lives in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She studied visual arts in Arnhem (NL) and Milan (I) and attended the international script development and directors program at the Binger Filmlab (NL). Jansen has had several national and international screenings, group shows and solo exhibitions, showing both her moving images and photographs.
The subjects of her works are transitory zones between the recognizable and the obscure, between the ordinary and the unusual. These fields have their own esthetics, where clear significance only exists through personal perception.
By scanning social contexts she examines different forms of social marginal behavior and taboos within the omnipresent media context. The work With Love depicts an ambivalent world that goes beyond this monomaniac world of fears and neurotics; it transforms the perverse rituals into more universal thematics such as pain, surrender and transcendence. Several forms of compulsive acting are widely embraced as protests against social conventions but actually deprive attention from what is really going on, outside these dark basements, in full daylight of the everyday.
Her most recent works represent these more subtle forms of -compulsive- behavior that are socially cherished as being normal. The frame of reference used continues to emphasize the ambivalence of a situation and guides the spectator into a reality via a suggestive or a compulsory representation of the subject. The response of the audience places the work in a wider, sociological framework; that of contemporary morality and ethics.
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