Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work investigates my feral childhood, the between-space between neglect and whimsy in the arid Southern California landscape. Questioning the construct of the American dream; the ways it failed my family and how we survived. I use symbolic images and multimedia applications to explore speculative memories, how we inhabit spaces, or disappear within them. Giving material form to my memories within these relationships instigates a decay of self-presence. The object now holds the memory. Spaces are drawn, flattened, then reimagined in hollow line or dimension without form. An act of unsettling and repopulating. My objects are utilitarian, simple, awkward, and absurd. My drawings rely heavily on line. My performances explore the artifacts that remain once they are finished. They investigate care, sometimes gendered sometimes not. It’s unclear if these spaces and objects I create are public or if viewing them is an intrusion into a private moment. This uncertainty excites me.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Daniela Markovic is a French artist based in Lausanne, Switzerland. She holds a Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Research from Paris 1, Sorbonne School of Arts, with a thesis titled Automata, Repetition and Emotional Projection. Her practice moves between automata, interactive systems, sound and installation, exploring the rituals, both bodily and mechanical, that humans develop to make sense of emotional uncertainty: loss, intimacy, connection, and the quiet persistence of life itself. In her installations, body fragments, mechanical gestures and intimate materials are held in a state of suspension. A hand repeats a gesture that never resolves. A heart continues to beat. A voice responds without being human. Repetition becomes a form of resistance, not a choice, but an instinct, a ritual, the body’s quiet refusal to disappear.
This attention to gesture, surface and repetition was already present in her earlier work as a painter. In Roi de nos lacs, the surface of Lake Geneva is built up in thick, layered strokes, scratched and rubbed back until light and water seem to move again beneath the paint. In A fleur de peau, portraits of women from Geneva’s red light district are rendered on damaged, crumpled kraft paper, carrying the marks of the lives they hold.
Across mediums, Daniela Markovic’s work inhabits liminal spaces where technology, material and gesture become vessels for memory, longing, repair and projection.
© Daniela Markovic