Looking - Limited Edition of 5 Photograph

The creative process of this piece began when I used the book: "30 años de historia gráfica de la Ópera en Caracas", where a photograph of two international opera singers: Pablo Elvira and Violeta Aleman, appears in "Lucia Di Lammermoor". I created the scene with model figures, took a picture of everything, and then digitally intervened the scene. I added, among other things, a copy of the photo of the singers on television, in such a way that they join the family nucleus with their musical spirit, thus showing the presence of opera in everyday life. Carmen Michelena imaginatively invents the past and represents the present. In his work the past is not linear. She fosters the mediation of the old, in objects and architectures, through the new, issues of current life, reviving a reading that contemporary photography has overlooked. Today, the old and the traditional are not only not compatible with innovation but, in fact, it indicates that this vision is necessary to create the current. In his new digital collages, it does not necessarily imply a complete rejection of the past, it is included. (Excess, the theatricality of space, fantastic zoology, irony, humor, collecting and the reinterpretation of images ...) are consistent elements of his work. His collages invite us to delve into his baroque and surreal "visual madness"; a staging, which produces an irresistible sense of disorientation by the very fact of the forced displacement of seeing, between here and there, below and above, to show us that events can be narrated in a way that blurs the border between the real and the fictitious. Art curator Elida Zalazar