Jeanne Szilit experiments with unconscious perception in the grey areas between film, photography and painting, as well as between everyday life and states of emergency. In her photographs and paintings she isolates moments, which according to our coded visual memory seem to be nothing but shreds of impressions between one moment perceived as significant and the next. In exteriorising those moments from the sequences of traditional imagery, she stages them, in a unique aesthetic, as events capable of new interpretation. In film, the invisibility of subliminal shreds of memory is a virtual precondition for the successful transport of traditional story content, as gestures and situations in film function as myths that permit the viewer to project his or her innermost memories onto the invented experience of others.

Jeanne Szilit, who studied film at the Munich Film Academy and has worked with filmconception on an international range, is well versed in the »plotting« of visual stories. As a photographer/painter she prefers to scan the fringes of stories, looking for points for escape. She poaches in the familiar, explores the remote, chases the shadows. Darkness lends her motifs their luminousity, renders them gentle and shocking like dreams. Often people and things disappear, and there remains nothing but the breathing movements of colors in imaginary space. The viewer may enter as he wishes to stage his most secret crises.


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