All Seeing Eye: The legs have eyes with Vestica
This interview was first published on medium.com, September 25, 2023
For MORROW collective’s exhibition All-Seeing Eye, the following Q&A is part of a series of short artist interviews. The showcase was on September 28, 2023 at the exhibition’s partner space Seeing Things on Alserkal Avenue, is paired with a drop on Foundation.
Exhibition framework: The concept of the all-seeing eye can be found across different cultures, religions, and philosophical systems throughout history. It is associated with powerful and all-encompassing attributes and is sometimes considered to symbolise a divine gaze watching over all of humanity. This exhibition lifts from those ancient beliefs to present a series of artworks depicting eyes that watch you as you watch them.
Still from Tear Legged by Vestica
by Anna Seaman
Mariah (Veštica) is a contemporary artist from Belgrade, Serbia. Her style is often characterized as a digital and traditional avant-garde experiment with indication of surreal, magic realism and post-expressionistic elements. Using the diverse approaches within a formally divergent field of media, from physical painting to processing art, she is confronting new and traditional techniques while questioning the position of art in technological society.
Mariah (Veštica) is a contemporary artist from Belgrade, Serbia.
Here she is in conversation with me, Anna Seaman, curator @MORROW collective.
AS: In your IG bio, you write: “I visualize the invisible”. Can you expand on that for us please, how do you summarize your approach to art making?
MV: Visualizing something that is not immediately obvious is the essence of my creativity. I see the artist’s job much like that of a scientist or engineer, creating a kind of “interface” to make complex information more accessible to the human sensory system. I borrowed this concept from my experience in the web2 industry. As a web programmer, I used to translate abstract, binary machine language into visually understandable concepts, enabling human-machine communication. Similarly, as an artist, my job is to translate the often hard-to-understand and hardly visible concepts of the unconscious and the world that surround us into a language familiar to the human sensory system. This is where a dialogue between the art and audience happens.
AS: There is often subversive irony in your surrealist pieces, what is your opinion on using dark humour as a tool to convey your message?
Unpleasant content is always easier to digest when a dose of humor is added. I use dark humor precisely to encourage the audience to introspect and engage in critical reflection. The language of subversion and irony is a suitable weapon for this intention. The characters in my works embody the struggle against imposed social norms and expectations. In that context, I also use the language of dreams and surrealism, because it represents what is inexplicable and illogical, thus beyond control and deviant. I enjoy using all these approaches to shift the viewer out of their comfort zone, even to create an uncomfortable feeling, as it then reflects a certain political power.
Still from Eyes Have Seen Murder by Vestica
AS: Let’s talk about process: are all your artworks hand drawn and then adapted to be digital?
My works are multimedia; I create both digitally and traditionally. In terms of creation, I am more skilled with physicals, since I come from a traditional art background. However, the process is much more complicated and takes much longer when it comes to digitalisation. The physical work that is scanned becomes a different piece of work, not just a digital counterpart of the physical. What you see on the screen is the first impression. A lot has to be processed and retouched after scanning.
AS: Do you already have the animations in mind when you start drawing or is that something that comes to life as the piece comes to life?
MV: When I work on an animation piece, I have a clear idea of the entire moving scene. Often, from these moving scenes that I visualize in my head, I extract the most interesting frames to turn them into static images. That’s probably why my static drawings sometimes look like frames taken from the middle of an animated film.