Sara Blosseville’s exhibition Tender Devices presents a series of soft screens made from images taken with her smartphone’s camera and printed onto recycled fabric.
The works were developed alongside Blosseville’s work in the garden and her visits to the oral culture archive at the Finnish Literature Society, where she has been reading people’s anecdotes about their daily lives, their relationships with their bodies and their connections to the land. While browsing through the archive, the artist kept stumbling upon stories that shared the idea of the ground as a conductive net. Blosseville now transposes this idea into a body of work that can be considered as a web of conductivity, where the pixels of digital images are given physical form within the weave of textiles.
Made using a field-recording approach, the photographic imagery found with the exhibition depicts scenes of everyday life cropped from the artist’s perception. With the ability to constantly create images out of reality – allowed by the proximity of the smartphone – the notion of “a moment” becomes fragmented and a certain sense of continuity is broken, or in Guy Debord’s words: “Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.”* Through the stitches of sewing that both separate the images and attach them together, Blosseville draws an analogy for the stigma necessary to create an image from one’s own perception via a camera lens.
The exhibition invites viewers to engage with themes of enhanced perception, and our relationship to the spaces we inhabit. How do the technologies that structure one’s daily life shape one’s intimate relationship with the contemporary world? These soft screens stem from a desire to give a body back to the blind spot that emerges when perceiving your environment through a complex tool like a smartphone becomes so normal that it feels like a part of yourself.
*Guy Debord, The Society Of The Spectacle (1967)