Santa France is a Latvian digital artist, mainly focusing on exploting the potential of 3D software and its usage in creating web-collages, videos, animated .GIF images and digital illustrations. She was born in 1993 and currently lives and works in Berlin.
Her nearly photorealistic, yet uncanny compositions are characterised bytheir impossibly pristine surroundings and the contrasting organic and man-made objects. The established hyperreality draws attention to the software used in its creation, as well as uses its visual language to examine issues rooted in our comtemporary existence – dealing with self-reflection, solitude, nostalgia and digital culture.
Her works challenge the boundaries of traditional art: she creates pieces which are not only visually appealing but also possess conceptual depth, raising questions about people’s digital identity and mental state in the hyper-technologysed world.
“Snakes and Adders”
digital illustration
2019
Location: atrium, 2nd floor
An illustration composed of living organisms, deceptively disguised between an array of other visually similar man-made objects. The depicted animals and plants are modeled solely after watercolor illustrations on a set of old postcards portraying endangered species in the former Soviet Union. After individually researching the contents of each postcard online, the latest information on the extinction status of some of the species remained unknown – information on this topic was hidden in an abundance of similar, but not entirely accurate data. The resulting composition was created by imagining a future where these species have gone completely extinct and the only evidence of their existence is buried under a mass of misleading information. The artificial counterparts to disguising these organisms were selected and modeled by feeding the original illustrations to a reverse image search engine as well as by making personal associations.
