About This Project
Ioana Vrabie
EYESCAPES STATEMENT
In 2013, after a few years working as a commercial photographer and spending long hours in front of the computer retouching images often ending up with backache, I started practicing yoga and I decided to leave London in search of a “reality that does not need retouching”. Just before the start of the journey, I received a providential gift from a stranger: a bag full of expired film rolls that I took together with my analogue camera to Italy, India and Bali.
During this trip, I instinctively started to shoot multiple exposure images, feeling a deep sense of liberation arising from overlapping different perspectives on the same film frame. The series Eyescapes was spontaneously born.
Seeing the images when the film was developed and the sensation I experienced when shooting pushed me to analise myself deeply: I realised that I shot these photographs in the moments when I was feeling overwhelmed by the beauty of the place I was in and in which I was trying to anchor myself forever somehow, “boxing” myself between the layers containing the main details that would attract my attention in those specific moments.
The inner conflict that I experienced in my personal life, growing up between two opposite realities, the Romanian communist and the Italian capitalist ones, without feeling completely at home in any of them, experiencing a constant feeling of unsettledness and desire to escape, finds resolution in my work through the creation of a third visual reality that synthesizes my conclusions of what is good of two or more different perspectives.
By looking outside through the camera lens I have actually got to see my inner world, found peace and realised that for me home is where there is time to seek and contemplate the beauty arising from overlapping different perspectives.
https://www.ioanavrabie.com/fine-art-photography
Date
Gennaio 03, 2020