Name | Magda Matwiejew

Country | Australia

DOB | 1956.05.29

Email | magda4@netspace.net.au

Web | www.magdamatwiejew.net

Curriculum Vitae | Click Here

Statement | Magda Matwiejew

Magda Matwiejew exhibited first as a painter and for the last 6 years has worked exclusively with digital media. Her main interest is experimental video and animation. She won best experimental animation for her film Insect at the 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Broken Spell, 2007
Broken Spell is an animated video about the concepts of love and climate. A young and beautiful couple are in love but the relationship cannot be consummated, like in the story of Romeo and Juliet. Catastrophic climate change has destroyed the couple’s love. While in the Shakespearean tragedy love is destroyed by tribal allegiance, in this scenario love cannot bloom because of the environmental disaster brought on by global warming. The lovers can be seen as a metaphor for our symbiotic relationship to the planet. We love it, but mercilessly abuse and devour it. The lovers are constantly surrounded by annihilation as buildings collapse around them and tornadoes rage and the earth cracks beneath them. However, they are never separated by these nightmarish circumstances and seem oblivious to the danger that besets them. Their only instinct is to never part. Perfect love as a concept is omnipotent. In reality however love inevitably has destructive consequences. Love is ultimately hazardous.

Arabesque, 2006
Arabesque is a work, which uses digital technology to create spaces and movement from still images. Spaces are formed that open and close, expose and conceal; form dissolves into abstraction, and the figured becomes unfigured. A sense of ritual and ceremony is implied by these changes and movements, and the veiling and unveiling of forms and scenes. A viewer is surrounded by and drawn into an imaginary world, where what is real and what is fantasy is uncertain, a synaesthetic world where forms, colours and patterns offer delight to the senses. The landscape is exotic, the female form is evocative…Through photograps forms are created that are both real and imaginary in Photoshop. Patterned latice walls slipp away to expose an imaginary representation of  the exotic. Knives slice through the sky and doorways open into a mirrored world of fantasy. Colour is used sensously and is changing through out. The emphasis is on decorativeness, on veiling and unveiling, opening and closing, entering and leaving. The veil represents abstract thought and conceals the unknowable.

The figure is representative of feminine erotic fantasy.
It is viewed ambiguously, Is it their fantasy or ours?
Are we looking in or are they looking out?

Arabesque finally is poetic rather than narrative in form.

INSECT, 2006
Insect is an experimental animation. A journey of erotic imagination with out the intervention of words creating a space between dream and reality. This is a world where all things become possible. Here a beautiful woman grows wings and slowly turns into an insect, but not before having sexual encounters with plants and a very amorous dragon fly. This metamorphosis is a devise in dealing with the images of desire unbounded by conventional form and stories and reminds us of how the concept of the erotic is often bounded by practical, social regulation, taboos etc.

Metamorphosis is age old, it appears in the mythology of all cultures for eg. The Aboriginal Dream Time Stories, where traditionally there is no gap between the real and the fantastic. In mythology there is no clear separation between the vegetive, the animal (insect) or the human. We are dealing with something which is fundamental to the nature of everything. A deep sense we are all related to the boundlessness of nature.

VAVARA BEYOND MEMORY, 2005
Vavara Beyond Memory is animated from original photographs taken in St Petersburg in 2004. The photos were  heavily worked on  in Photoshop  in conjunction with scans of old Russian paintings and a heavy use of the pressure stylus for painting on to the images. I have concentrated on creating an atmosphere of softness, that is dreamy and romantic. It is a work that has evolved intuitively with the intention to expand what I had  already produced in the  original exhibition of the same name.

Vavara  is a journey through memory, both real and genetic. It is about the  displacement of my family through time and as immigrants to Australia, and also about the displacement of a culture. The Russian Csarist regime displaced by Communism.

My native Russian culture being replaced by the culture of the land of my Parents migration. Snow features strongly as it is a symbol of the seasons changing and the cleansing of the earth and of our psyches. Snow is stronly identified with the Russian Winter Landscape. Snow is not part of our urban Winter Landscape in Australia and has always been a sourse of great fascination to me. It is integral to my artistic practice to explore these issues as they have always  been prevalent in my life and have been  absorbed  in varying degrees in  all my imagery. Vavara is my great grandmother and she is sitting next to my grandmother. My father’s apparition or memory is seen  both as a young man and an old man before his death. This combined with Russian Folk Lore and the Russian Landscape is the setting for this film.