Anita Cruz-Eberhard 

Untitled #26, Digital Ikebanas 

Untitled #26

About the artist

It would be wrong to describe Anita Cruz-Eberhard - a graduate of the School of Visual Arts (New York) - as a photographer. Visual artist is much more suitable. To her, images take little account of reality: they feed on other images, often grabbed on the Internet. Whether through botanical compositions (Digital Ikebanas) or shooting-range targets (Targets I & II), Anita Cruz-Eberhard develops a deeply graphic and sensitive body of work. The shapes she creates are silhouetted against a black background, which also enhances the colour palette chosen by the artist. Her work follows a process of re-appropriation and re-composition, which, although widespread since the days of collage, has taken on new forms with the rise of the Internet.

Interview

What are these Digital Ikebanas?
The series is inspired by the ancient aesthetic art of Japanese Ikebana floral arrangement.  
However, my Ikebana exist only as prints and digital images, considering that they are composed out of a wide variety of plant images taken from online databases of university biology departments all over the world.
They have been repurposed to investigate the relationship between artifice and nature.
 
The spectrum of compositional possibilities seems endless. What criteria did you follow when making the arrangements?
Very true, and this means creating the combinations is a lengthy process.
My paradigm is to create an equilibrium of linear construction in order to create a form of beauty that cannot be found in nature, using varied plant material, such as flowers, branches, leaves, grasses, moss, fruit, wilted leaves, seed pods and buds.
The essence of Ikebana is beauty resulting from the arrangement of formal combinations, natural shapes, graceful lines, and the meaning underlying the ultimate form of the layout.
Additionally, I take into account asymmetrical form and the use of empty space as an essential feature of the composition, which are characteristic of Ikebana.

Your work is very much based on digital manipulation. What new territories has this opened up to your artistic endeavours?
I was inspired by techniques of modern re-photography, of layering digital media and by aspects of appropriation - considering the basic act of making art as a borrowing of images or concepts from the surrounding world, and re-interpreting them as art. This is an artistic practice that incorporates much of the methods of Postmodernism.
Found objects, contemporary images, and images from the past have all been appropriated by artists and used in their work.  However, the appropriation of digital images in art is a phenomenon new to the twentieth century.  I take a keen interest in this idea, while also embracing the use of contemporary technologies such as the Internet.
Every new advance in information technology facilitates the creation of new works or ideas, thus paving the way for a broad potential of artistic practices. Digital technology makes it possible to manipulate images as never before, and allows me to invent not only new forms of “reproduction” but also of “production”.
The result - a digital image - is not just the artefact of a new way of producing images, but a radically new image, and this may force art to re-conceptualize the very notion of image. In many ways, digital arts investigate the relationship between the real and the virtual.

Limited edition, numbered and signed.

Selected shows and awards

Behind the Curtain – The Aesthetics of the Photo booth, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2012
A Juried Exhibition of New York City Visual Artists, Rush Arts Gallery, New York, 2011
7th Art Athens, Technopolis Museum, Athens, Greece, 2011
Outono Fotográfico, Ourense, Spain, 2010
5th Festival Festimage, Chaves, Portugal, 2010
International Photography Awards – 2nd place, category "Nature Flowers Pro", 2010          
24th International Festival of Fashion and Photography, villa Noailles, Hyères, France, 2009
Sony World Photography Awards – Winner, category : abstract, 2008

Selected publications

7th Athens Video/Art Festival, Technopolis Museum, Athens, Greece, in: 2011 Edition, Exhibition Catalog, Digital Image, 05/2011, pp. 180-182
Anita Cruz-Eberhard, Digital Ikebanas, in : Hyères 2009; 24th International Festival of Fashion & Photography, Exhibition Catalog, villa Noailles - Archibooks, Paris, 2009, pp. 42-47
Sony World Photography Awards, in: Exhibition Catalog, World Photography Awards Ltd., London, U.K. 2008, pp. 20-21
Best of Photography Annual 2008, in: Photographer’s Forum, 12/2008
Pix #13, in: PDN Photo District News, New York, 11/2007

Details

& order

Anita Cruz-Eberhard 
Untitled #26, Digital Ikebanas

2011

Technical information

Digital Lambda c-print on satin paper - limited edition, numbered and signed certificate.

Dimensions

40 x 30 cm, Edition of 100 200.00 €




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