Art

SYL ØPHALVENS (JETTE-BELGIUM °1989) is a conceptual and experimental collage, video and painting artist who lives and works in Ninove (Belgium).

During her childhood she used painting & collage as a way to process feelings and memories. Those memories were visualized in her early work.
Over the years she has been collecting an immense amount of images and text fragments. In her work she puts them in different contexts and investigates the impact and relation between the conscious and the subconscious. The effect of this recombination and permutation process can be alienating, absurd, mysterious, conflicting, … The images are chosen (almost) arbitrarily to create a radical openness towards different interpretations.

In her work, which consists of fascinating collages and installations integrating video work and paintings, SYL ØPHALVENS explores the liminal zone in which dream and reality flow into each other on a disturbing, often threatening way.
She explores the individual and collective unconscious by combining highly personal dream messages and materials from the family archive with images from art, film and media.

The combinations of moving pictures and stills evoke a certain uncanny atmosphere ; they trigger uncontrollable associative processes in the viewer. This effect is based on the different media she uses (collage, painting, video art, Photopolymer, ...) but also on the space in which her work is presented.