Raissa Venables
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 Red Stairs by Raissa Venables |
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| Born: | 1977 |
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| Occupation: | Artist |
Raïssa Venables, born 1977 in New Paltz, USA, is a photographic artist based in New York.
Raïssa Venables studied fine arts at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1995 to 1999. From 1999 to 2002 she studied photography at Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College.
She has had several solo exhibitions at places such as the Kunstverein Ulm and at the Galerie HERRMANN & WAGNER, Berlin, Germany and at the Jersey City Museum, Jersey City in 2005.
[edit] Style
The photographs of Raïssa Venables often depict rooms devoid of people and events. At first glance they resemble film stills and the affinity to classics by Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, or David Lynch is evident. Everything is copied from reality but distorted into surreal images. Using digital image processing Venables manipulates the locations to instrumentalize the room with its emptiness and its many interpretations.
Venables uses a complex technique. When she’s found an interesting location she visits it with her camera and takes pictures from every angle. She then rearranges the frames, scans the negatives and composes the picture on the computer. This process resembles the process of a film sequence:
“Even if we decode Venables’ image language, the contents of her pictures, and the creative process, we are still confronted with the mystery of a psychological room – analogous to a movie, whose staged thrill we can’t escape, although we are able to analyze it.” Matthias Harder – Helmut Newton Foundation
It is a concept that reminds one of neo-cubism where the object is split and dissolved and then reassembled, or the collages by David Hockney.
What is important in Venables' pictures is the mise en scene. She is deeply influenced by Early Renaissance painters especially Flemish painters such as Jan van Eyck or Robert Campin. This influence is to be seen in Venables use of colour and lighting, and the way these affect the soul of a room.
