DEEP F***
ARTWORK BY MASHA BATSII
These images are stills from a movie that hasn’t been made. It is a movie about yearning for the unknown, about being pulled towards a moment of perfect fleeting beauty—and something stranger too. It is an old tale of a hero, a young woman in search of a treasure; and they will find that treasure inside of themselves.
She and the algorithms perform one another’s tasks, they collaborate. “Something about making it—I had a weird moment where it felt like the machine was trying to understand me/like it had subconsciousness/we were vibing off each other."
In one her hair curls into Murano-glass flourishes and bubbles, an ocean, virtual waves. The artist makes everything now. Images are not captured, they’re constructed.
It all began with a badly worded prompt … an erratic thought … poetry.
Her face glows orange and very subtly, lightly green. She casts shadows from the sun, but she also glows from within. The air around her glows too. This is what digital images are: they are pure light pouring out of the machine.
Bright ghostly spectral washes of light appear on the image. In places they burn right through and dissolve the image. It’s like she is on fire. It’s like she is made of expired SX-70, like her skin is the film in the sunshine. The model is the medium, and the surface on which she appears.
The model turns into a splash of paint; which they are, they are material pulled around the screen. The models, like the artist, like the images and the process of image making, are in a state of transformation.
The models are hyperreal—they are signs that refer to other signs, but never all the way back down to reality—and yet appear more real than some living, breathing models.
They are perfect images of that which is not real.
Where is my love? What is behind the hazy horizon?
Take me back. Ocean curl. You’re not a wave breaking on the shore, you are the deep, wide ocean as far as the eye can see. Just out of reach, a mirage, a desert island oasis.
Take me back—where? Nothing is real: not the blue sky above you, not the cerulean sea, not the horizon you yearn for.
ARTIST: MASHA BATSII
CASTING DIRECTOR: VIRGIN ATLANTIC
MODELS: MIRANDA, MARION & IRM
LOCATION SCOUT: ERIC SERRA
MAKE UP ARTIST: EDWIN H. LAND
HAIR STYLIST: RENÉ LALIQUE
POST-PRODUCTION: STUDIO PRIVATE