Copyright 2022 Sylvie Covey
The Creative Process
An Analysis of content and Medium
5. Values
In all of my subsequent work, the series Meetings, Passages, and Eros, 1996 – 2002, I seek to represent not our anatomical and sexual differences and similarities, but the values we attach to them. In the Passages Series in particular, I wanted to address the issues of fetishism and control using the visual elements of bondage, masks, ropes, and veils from a feminist viewpoint, which establishes “a voyeur space” – the distance between the voyeur and the subject seen.
Seeing and Being Seen
In the Eros Series, I tried to subvert the documentary reality of the photographic image to reveal different meanings in eroticism that a viewer can read in many ways. I think of eroticism not as a formal aspect of my work but rather as part of the process of seeing and being seen. In general, I wish to create a portrayal of the objects of our desires. Perhaps the repetition of these pictorial statements, their layering, their dissolution or their movement question and reflect on, rather than celebrate, this portrayal.
Eros, Laura, digital print, 2003, 15” x 22” // More in my portfolio
Ropes, photo etching with 8 plates, 1998, 30” x 40” // More in my portfolio
The Question of Reproduction
Photography and printmaking are often reduced to a means of mechanical reproduction. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each medium requires as much imagination, effort, attention, and creativity as painting, drawing, and sculpting require. A plate or a camera is nothing more than a tool, as are a tube of paint, a carving knife, or a paintbrush. We may, however, question its authenticity (original versus copy) and its mechanical rather than manual reproduction.
Emerging, photogravure with dry point etching, 30” x 40”, 1995 // More in my portfolio
From Figure to Abstraction
Printing editions of my work is a very low priority, which sets me apart from other printmakers. I am however interested in the concept of reproducing visual images in a grid pattern by photographic processes that transform the object of the image into an idea rather than the object itself. I am also interested in the repetition of a pictorial statement that works toward abstracting a figure to the point of transforming it into a concept. In the Windows and Maternity series, as in the Dances and Naked Man in the Woods series, I was not concerned with one particular image but with all of them. I used the convention of the grid as a film sequence without references to time and space. The images on each frame of the grid have their own separate story, framed and reduced in size by the whole of the grid. I used the grid as a map through time but without order, as our memory and our emotions exist without conscious order.