Bodies without Faces


The collision between my rural past and the new metropolitan art-world reality determined the beginning of my career and still echoes in many moments of my work.
My production moves through different technical registers: painting, sculpture, photography, silk screen, but there is no chronological rigidity in my use of media. For instance, at any moment I can resume one of my previously adopted techniques, because as I see it, there are endless possibilities.

I initially produced paintings in the portrait genre, representing both myself and my friends. I would cut the faces out and paste them over images of old dolls’ bodies. I was mainly interested in the different treatment of figure and ground. I worked the figure meticulously, in contrast to the background surfaces, which were sometimes flat and monochromatic, sometimes in patterns that recall those used in decorating. The foreground figure represents the affective content and the idealized past; the heads are portrayed in the present moment and the bodies are references taken from books on old dolls. Then I elaborated a series of backlit photographs. Here the relation is inverted: the affective memory is present in the childhood photographs and the idealized past in the heads of old dolls that depersonalize the figures…




Keila Alaver