Terrible seasons of youth 2022
photography diptych of handmade collages
Terrible seasons of youth is a photography diptych of handmade collages. Inspired by teenage bedroom walls, often covered with cut-out magazine pages, memories, and symbols of personal identification, these collages are crafted from printed stills of my childhood videos alongside reclaimed footage from the internet. In this project, I explore the idea of youth in America– its playfulness, violence, desires and longing. As a child of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, growing up between the USA and Europe, I was fed in both worlds the same American imagery brought to us on TV. By collecting recurring symbols and esthetics of American cultural youth values, I paint an idea of such a childhood, which, thanks to popular visual media, is already part of our visual knowledge, ingrained in our minds and memories. The TV here serves as a metaphor for how private and public worlds converge through popular visual mediums. How media is the foundation for zeitgeist, and simultaneously a vessel to escape it, oftentimes through fabricated nostalgia, by using common memories of youth.
120x140cm