Ann-Sophie Deproost
(Bruges, Belgium,1989)
—Installation Pich Aguilera (Map)
Ann-Sophie Deproost is a visual artist whose practice centres on a process of technical hybridisation between drawing and photography in a quest to erase the limits that separate the two disciplines. Her pictorial art intervenes and re-signifies her photographic images.
Her work should be seen within the critical currents of Visual Studies or Anthropology of the Image, particularly as regards her reflections on the gaze and the way she compares and contrasts image and medium, that is to say, the different nature of the mental image and the material image.
The camera is no longer the photographer's only tool; the scanner, the screenshot and appropriation of the found image have all become much-used resources in the practice of photography. Deproost's experimental research includes mixed procedures of image manipulation, whether chemical, mechanical, digital or manual. Laboratory, desk and computer. This varied approach also applies to her drawing, as she uses pencil, traditional ink, different pigments and the digital printer.
All this and the selection of the final medium, the choice of paper, whether photographic or not, its texture, its grammage, its corporeality, all combine to make each work unique. A singularity in stark contrast with the infinite reproducibility of the photograph.
Her work process is slow, as she adds layers of time and meaning to a work not intended to represent a tangible and univocal reality but a poetic and fragmented interpretation of that same reality.
The concept of the decisive instant is made null and void by the accumulation of these material strata in the fertile soil of the image. This stratification suggests different layers of time. Landscape motifs and urban fragments in black and white are intervened by drawing in a gradual creation that takes time as its main theme. Time, or its collapse.