Stevie Bezencenet

This exhibition presents a cohesive body of work, which encompasses a range of media including digital photography and digital video. BezencenetÕs work is concerned with issues of landscape, identity and power and with how our sense of self is influenced by the landscapes through which we move. Her work is concerned with how landscapes offer us dreams and how we manage to negotiate these. She is interested in the expansive dreams of men and how women feel placed by them.
The three works that comprise the exhibition relate to the traditions of landscape imagery, the dreams with which they interact and the possibility of transgressing the conventions in a search for a language, which borders on incoherence.

Artist's Statement

My general concerns are those issues of landscape identity and power - with how our sense of self is influenced by the landscapes through which we move. I am interested in how landscapes offer us dreams and how we manage to negotiate these. I am interested in the expansive dreams of men and how women feel placed by them. I am interested in how women move in and through landscapes and the effect such movement has on their capacity to act. Traditional landscape imagery has a set of conventions, which offers us recognition, reassurance, drama and coherence. They are pleasurable to produce and easy to consume. There is no transgression here. There is an adherence to a romantic tradition, which invites us to be moved by the drama of Nature and interpret it with the rhetoric of photography. Photographs like language holds things in place. They both hold us in place. These three works are concerned with the traditions of landscape imagery, the dreams with which they interact and the possibility of transgressing the conventions in a search for a language, which borders on incoherence. Wilderness Dreams This series of three panoramas considers the American Dream of finding a new Eden. Extended natural space provides the backdrop for the search for the self and the paradoxical fantasies of oblivion and control, which assert themselves in the face of natural phenomenon. Frontier Dreams This series of four photographs is concerned with the relationship between gender, technology and our sense of being in or out of place. The city demonstrates our desire to extend ourselves. It maps ways in which we have projected our imagination and utilised technology to follow it. These images seek to address how one might feel when confronted with these different attempts to extend and control our own power. Do we feel implicated, confronted, alienated, optimistic? Trespass This video maps a journey from dusk to dawn through pastoral space. Someone voyages, looking more closely at what we pass by so easily during daylight. Things change: light fades, silence falters, the dark becomes a passageway to new conditions of perception. The night becomes a canvas, providing imagery which cannot simply be explained away. Can the image stop us in our tracks? Stevie Bezencenet October 2000