Excerpt from Commentary published in the Catalogue of the European Month of Photography, Vienna 2008:

 

Jeanne Szilit experiments with unconscious perception in the grey areas between film and photography as well as between everyday life and states of emergency. In her photographs she isolates moments, which according to our coded visual memory seem to be nothing but shreds of impressions between one moment perceived as significant and the next. In exteriorising those moments from the sequences of traditional imagery, she stages them, in a unique aesthetic, as events capable of new interpretation. In film, the invisibility of subliminal shreds of memory is a virtual precondition for the successful transport of traditional story content, as gestures and situations in film function as myths that permit the viewer to project his or her innermost memories onto the invented experience of others.

Jeanne Szilit, who studied film at the Munich Film Academy and has worked with filmconception on an international range, is well versed in the »plotting« of visual stories. As a photographer she prefers to scan the fringes of stories, looking for points of escape. She poaches in the familiar, explores the remote, chases the shadows. Darkness lends her motifs their luminousity, renders them gentle and shocking like dreams. Often people and things disappear, and there remains nothing but the breathing movements of colors in imaginary space. The viewer may enter as he wishes to stage his most secret crises.

Commentary by Carl Aigner, Director of the Niederösterreisches Landesmuseum,  in “EIKON, International Magazine of Photography and Media Art” 2009:

JEANNE SZILIT – IDYLL AND ABYSS

Idyllic, fairytale-like and delusive appear the new photographical work series of artist Jeanne Szilit, which seem to oscillate between film and photography. Szilit punctures time, tattooes a moment through light, establishing it as saved time, as time‘s suddenness. She cuts time-pieces, deconstructs the flow of events into a thousand microscopic picture moments. Particles of the real become fragments of fixed memory. Picture spaces coagulate into lucid visions, dreamy shapes or pure light and color formations representing images of desire, yearning and melancholy. Thus emerges a new emotionality of the visual, which by far surpasses the atmospheric quality of traditional picture worlds, carrying the viewer away into spheres of hallucination. Sigmund Freud once described the work of dreams as a process of compressing experience particles into new picture structures. Jeanne Szilit is not only aware of that but realizes it as her essential picture strategy: „As a photographer I am interested in stopping the flow of events, showing the open, often uncannily open possibilities of interpretation“. Not only the „moment decisif“ (Cartier-Bresson) is relevant for her, but a sort of extreme attention to emotionally charged picture-transformations. Hardly you find finalities here, everything is an interim solution of the open, the infinite. As generally Jeanne Szilit is able to capture in a touching, almost tenderly way the transitive quality of life and its reminiscent tracks. And it is the great visual musicality of her picture compositions that results in a concert of glances, enabling a new aesthetic-emotional exchange with the work that connects us like an umbilical cord with our own world of memory, the subjective cosmos of the irreplaceable.

Carl Aigner, EIKON Nr.66

 

Excerpt from “JEANNE SZILIT –  TRANCE DIARY ALBUMS”, published in the Month of Photography Catalogue 2010

Kiss me, kiss me, so I can wake up.

Siri Hustvedt

In fictional TRANCE DIARY ALBUMS, Jeanne Szilit stages a visual journey into the inside of things, into the space between form and emptiness, between appearance and being. “When I opened my eyes, I thought that perception itself is a form of hallucination,” the American author Siri Hustvedt writes. The soul constantly produces dreams, trances we do not even notice. We dream with our eyes open (or with “Eyes Wide Shut,” as Kubrick had it). In trance, we perceive images and experience their psychological and emotional effect freefrom the constraint of definitions. For her new experiments with unconscious perception, Szilit simulated photographic processes of transformation using complex filmic and digital instruments. The objects represented dissolve into particles of visual meaning, no longer tied to the moment of “capture”; caught in a specific state of transformation, they seem adrift in a vast space of time and light. In different stages of disappearance, they lose their  boundaries and gain a strange aspect of intimacy, like dream-shapes that reflect emotional processes. Their immaterial presence thus emerges in the territory that surrounds them and that they evacuate—a territory in which, as pure imagination, they will soon disappear without a trace.

 

“In my work I intuitively explore a variety of psychological themes by digitally manipulating a motif from the inside, using its inbound layers of colour and light like a canvas, thus attacking, rearranging, extinguishing and so transcending its original context”.

Jeanne Szilit