Liza May Post
Dutch photographer Liza May Post (°1965) didn't enrol in her first art course until she was 23, first at the Rietveld Academy and later at the Rijksacademie, both in Amsterdam. Her focus is on highly-stylised photography and film work, through which she attempts to capture the essence of human postures and movement.
Post devotes her time to exploring the coercion that people experience as a result of their surroundings along with their inability to resist this pressure. She takes the impotence of humans and distils it, as it were, into scenes that have been radically simplified; the characters in her work are anonymous 'interim figures', devoid of personal characteristics. They are positioned in such a way as to obscure the viewer's gaze, with faces turned away or hidden beneath or behind garments. All the while they perform a strange, irrational choreography, contorted and frozen in their positions, alone and isolated, and unable to come into contact with each other. They appear to be lost, wandering and caught up in an autistic universe.
Her film work contains no escalating build-up of tension or any dramatic developments, her intent is rather to elicit a certain atmosphere. She implies more than she says, and her works live and move and find their being in the logic of dreams rather than the rational. Liza May Post personally describes her own work as sublimated images from the stories that live in her head. She doesn't really care whether the viewer is able to reconstruct those stories, it is “the point”, the essence and the atmosphere that she is seeking to convey, all condensed into a single image. The result is often a comical or ridiculous fusion of movements and situations; however, more often than not what prevails is a feeling of oppression and a bitter aftertaste.
On a scale that barely skims the surface, her works represent psychological disorders, psychological breaks and the mind's collapse. Despair and madness are recurring elements in this oppressive oeuvre.