The relationship I have with my art is quite simple. To me, it’s the only way to express myself, I have troubles distancing myself from it. I am an introvert, so Art allows me to open up. My art is like an extension of myself, a projection of what I am, something that allows people to get to know me.
My relationship with photography is related to my creative process. It’s a process I always do alone, I need this time to think about the theme, the message I want to get across the project… It demands a huge introspective work, all the time. But this work is something that makes me feel good and allows me to grow.
LOVE PROJECT
Love Project is similar to my other projects because it has come from my personal experience.
For a long time I have been in an affective dependency phase, I worked a lot on myself and did a lot of introspection to get myself out of it. I used to have these thoughts on love and how I should love. It was really unhealthy, it was like a drug. I used to be dependent of every person I had a relationship with (not only romantically).
I had this urge to express it so I first wrote it down and then I read about affective dependency. I watched videos, read articles, I really wanted to work on myself. In a certain way it felt good but I also had the feeling of being crazy, I thought I was completely alone. So even if I did all of this research to get better, I also did it to feel normal, no longer weird. To me it felt like: “I have a disease, so I need to heal.”
I could feel in my research that there was an obsession around it. At first, I didn’t want to create something with it, I was embarassed to even show it to people. And then one day in my Youtube recommandations I noticed an audio book (thank the algorythm). It was “The Mastery of Love” from Don Ruiz Miguel. The title got to me, I guess that’s what I wanted : to master love, to control this feeling that made me dependent to others.
So I listened to it and it hit me. Especially the chapter “The man who didn’t believe in love“. I actually based my video on this chapter. When I first listened to it I felt like I was finally understood. This chapter had described word to word what I had been feeling for the longest time. It really healed a part of me.
And that’s when I realized I had to share this. I thought that if someone wrote this book, it meant that this person went trhough the same thing as me. Therefore I am not alone. Other people felt this or still feel it. That’s how the Love Project was born.
I use the image of an angel to break its romantic and kind reputation in pop culture. I wanted to turn the good guy into the bad guy. Here, the angel is not a friend, a confident or a guardian. He’s a servant of love, but he doesn’t have at heart the wellbeing of the second character, the Beloved. I went 100% with the cliché, I wanted something so pink it would make me want to puke.
At first, this shade of pink can be seen as something reassuring or cute. But here it is too much, and that’s the idea, that shade of pink can cause an overdose just as much as love. We always see love as something beneficial, something that pushes us to be better. It’s beautiful, it’s noble but what if it was the opposite ? What if it was a drug, something artificial that made us addicted to it. An unhealthy substance, making us stuck.
Anyway, this is the vision I wanted to show and I think people relate to it. The mood is very dreamy, ethereal, and even if it’s not my usual style, it is working to emphasize surreal love.
You can find Alyssia on Instagram.