Zane Mellupe-Goutard // LV / FR

Zane Mellupe-Goutard is an artist from Latvia based in Shanghai and founder of YongkangLuArt and WhyWhyArt. She created “pencil drawing”, a style where contemporary photography is printed on wood and covered with several layers of pencil. She transfers her own description, analysis, interpretation and judgement onto the photograph by way of her pencil technique. Her style plays with the distance of the audience: depending on the observer’s standpoint, different aesthetic aspects and layers of her work of art reveal themselves.

In this piece, a landscape of ferns seems to be covering a wooden surface that contains traits of another life.The artist removed the circle from the canvas, to reveal formerly concealed segments and illustrate that there is more to the wooden canvas than meets the eye; different layers of realities and perception are invisible to the eye, until the artist pulls them out into the light. The wooden board used to be a ceiling of a flower shop, and has now shifted its reality, becoming a piece of art.

The viewers’ eyes are occasionally led over to the vanishing point in the distance to the left of the canvas, but the eyes are repeatedly drawn back to the nature of the surface holes.

Every artist spends time creating a piece of art. Sometimes the time spent is visible, as in the case of the holes,Other times, the effort is still hidden under the naked eye.

Embarking on photography studies at the age of fourteen in Riga, and subsequently in London and Shanghai, Zane Mellupe devises her artistic work as a way of “thinking in images”. Her installations and mixed technique photographic work reveal hidden interpretations of our feelings.

Zane’s artistic work can be divided into two parts: the personal where she focuses on herself, and the social where she tackles societal issues, often involving other artists in order to research the topic and create a dialogue with society.

In her art works, Mellupe employs three mediums important to her: the image, the object and the body. The object merges with the image, while the body reclaims its functions and enters the photographic image. These three mediums are in a dynamic of simultaneous coordination and opposition.

A recurring element in her work is the questioning of photography, treating the image as if it were an object, and multiplying the suggestive powers of the image. She attempts the visualization of metaphors that allow us to express states of mind through the creation of works that echo the “physical world of literature”. Photography and reality merge together in Mellupe’s work, creating a constant back-and-forth between the material and the conceptual.