KAOS Festival of International Collage in Kranj, Slovenia from Jun 10 to Aug 13, 2022.
The series Today Never Happened is about the memories one thinks about during sleepless nights and the unknown familiar places one visits in dreams.
Michele Landel creates intimate cinematic stories from photographs, bedsheets, pastels, and thread. She begins by photographing formal and empty transitional spaces and prints these photos onto second hand bedsheets. Water is dripped onto the photographs, creating stains and reinforcing the intimacy of the medium. The artist draws shadowy figures in powdered pastel onto the sheets and then stitches bits of ripped up fabric and transparent tea bag paper over the figures. As a result of these collaged layers, the faceless people appear to emerge and disappear into the background. Like a dream, no one outside the frame is there to witness the scene. The empty figures are unseeing and are black/blank canvases for the viewer's own stream of consciousness narrative. Arranged together in ambiguous relationships and couplings, the figures' gender and race are fluid and vague, leaving space for the viewer to project their own assumptions and ideas.
