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South African artist Olivié Keck interrogates society’s morbid preoccupation with crimes of passion as entertainment – and it’s never looked so good, writes Design Indaba’s Alix-Rose Cowie.
Artists are world-builders; whether borrowing from existing architecture or imagining new landscapes, they have to set the scene in which their narratives play out. The worlds of South African artist Olivié Keck are saturated with psychedelic colours and patterns, seeping with hot bright ink from her Copic Markers.
As still images they vibrate with energy, but by means of virtual reality (VR) she’s really bringing them to life. Keck’s first experience of VR was with Tilt Brush by Google.
The programme enables you to paint in 3-D space using hand-held controllers – with the space around you becoming your canvas. Different brushes and effects can be chosen to express your creativity.
“I found the experience completely liberating and otherworldly,” she says.
“It was something I wanted to be a part of. I had a feeling the medium would wow art audiences and I wanted to see where I could take it with my own aesthetic flavour.”
Drop Dead Gorgeous is Keck’s solo show which ended this week at the Circa Gallery in Johannesburg. The work interrogates society’s morbid fascination with crimes of passion as entertainment. In them, her fashionable victims lie face down in a swimming pool or at a party, with the latter having taken down a tray of fancy canapés and a glass of Merlot with her.
“The works embody a playful parody rooted in a more serious questioning of our cultural obsession with depictions of violence and the romanticism of crime as entertainment,” reads the artist’s statement.
Keck’s most recent VR piece, Ophelia Forever, is an extension of her series. The victim is William Shakespeare’s Ophelia, who, driven mad with grief and betrayal, drowned herself in a river.
Keck joins a legion of artists who have depicted the heroine, most famous of whom is John Everett Millais, whose painting – Ophelia – was completed in 1852.
In Keck’s version she immortalises the scene from Hamlet in pixels instead of paint.
The classic depiction is given a contemporary, high-tech twist. Instead of viewing the artwork on the gallery wall, it exists only in the 3-D realm, to which you’re transported by putting on VR goggles and headphones.
The effect is as if you’ve stepped inside the artwork, surrounded by Keck’s colours in every direction you look. You are a voyeur and before you the lifeless body of Ophelia lies suspended in a koi pond. It appears as though you’re standing in a beautiful courtyard, looking up at pink clouds floating in a pale blue sky while birds chirp between sweeping ambient sounds.
Expanding Keck’s 2-D works into all-encompassing environments means considering unfamiliar elements to a painter, such as motion and sound. To create the world in Ophelia Forever, she collaborated with programmer Evan Greenwood and sound designer Jason Sutherland.
She compares the collaborative process of working in VR to creating a film. As the art director, Keck has to consider the multiple perspectives that the scene will be viewed from; she can’t predict where a viewer might place their gaze.
She always starts by drawing an imagined landscape by hand, “a kind of mood board for the feeling of the scene”, she says.
“There are a lot of unforeseen complexities when you are taking a single drawn perspective into a panoramic environment that people can explore from multiple viewpoints.”
Modelling the scene in 3-D and creating the layout in the game engine was the most time-consuming part of the project. Greenwood animated the scene, giving physics and movement to the objects in it, and the environment came alive.
“How things move and how that movement feels to the player is important. It’s easy to make people feel nauseous in VR, so you want to try and avoid changes in velocity, rocking motions or sudden drop-offs,” Keck says.
In Ophelia Forever, the calming sounds in the experience strike a mood that’s purposefully at odds with the tragic scene with which you are faced.
“I think I want people to be struck by conflicting emotions when they view the piece,” she says.
“We’ve gone to great lengths to make the scene feel both peaceful and ominous. The saturated colours and the movement of the world almost feels whimsical and playful. However, the tranquil drowned body in the pond takes [it] to a more sinister place ... ”
Keck enjoys this juxtaposition; “I want the viewer to think: ‘I feel strangely complicit in a horrific event though I’m struck by the beauty and romance of the scene at the same time.’ I think being human is about fluctuating between dualities. I think that’s happening to us in real life all the time. I just like to turn up the dial and take it a bit further. ‘If in doubt, say it loud’ is my motto with art-making.”
- See more of Keck's work on Instagram @oliviekeck
- Some of the works from Drop Dead Gorgeous can still be see at Everard Read, Jellicoe Ave, Rosebank
- This article first appeared on designindaba.com
