Artist Appreciation: Maryanna Casanta - Eyes Outside Our Bodies

As you should all know by now, I am a Fine Art student. I am nearing my graduation and considering taking my career on a different route to the artistic one but art will always be the thing that I have spent so long studying and enjoying. Despite my change of direction, art will be a continued presence on this blog and in my life.

While researching for my final project I came across the artist Maryanna Canasta and her series Eyes Outside Our Bodies. I was mesmerised. 

Casanta's website has this to say about her work...

Eyes Outside Our Bodies (The Infra-Ordinary) presents new work by Toronto-based artist Maryanne Casasanta. The relationships between art and home, art and life, home and studio, and the interstitial space between image and object are drawn together through photography, temporary installations, and found or fabricated objects. Photographic documents of small gestures, subtle interventions, and material constructions move in the universe of the everyday. Common artifacts are re-imagined as a way to transform a routine experience, promoting an active immersion in, and reconsideration of, small, ordinary events. Her work proposes a heightened awareness of the prosaic, where present moments are transformed into a medium for communication, and objects, actions, and seemingly insignificant encounters are assigned new meaning.

I posted the images of my final degree show and my my work a week or so ago, explaining that my work is about the infra-ordinary. Infra-Ordinary is term used to explain small, seemingly unimportant details that usually go unnoticed. My work was about capturing these details and looking at them in a different way, Casanta's work is also about capturing small details and seeing beauty in the things we see everyday but do not pay attention too.

I have chosen to mostly show you the photographs which depict shadows because I find them the most beautiful. Shadows are either ignored or found scary in my opinion, you read stories and see on tv the tales of children scared of shadows and horror movies with looming murderous shadows, this is what I think of when I think of shadows. These everyday shadows are merely dismissed and their beauty is not seen. 

That is what these photographs say to me.

These photographs show a harmony between the man made and nature, the sun is reflecting itself onto our world/our possessions. It is a magical thing in my opinion to be able to see nature being a part of our world.

If you would like to delve further into Maryanna Casanta's work you can find her website here.