Artist
Jeroen De Wandel
Jeroen De Wandel (b. 1980) lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. He studied photography at Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent. Jeroen De Wandel uses material from his personal archive to generate new images. He combines, recomposes, cuts, tears and pastes both analogue and digital pictures in his search for the unexpected.
De Wandel’s work becomes more and more a mix of photography, collage and other types of visual/installation art. It’s no longer pure photography. He still starts out from his archive of (autobiographical) pictures, interests and experiences. Main themes are time, memories and the working of the brain, relationship of photography with paintings and re-use/recycling.
Every work stands on its own - it’s no longer a series, it’s more an ongoing creation of his own visual world.
Amygdala, his most recent project of which you can see some pictures here, refers to the place in the brains where emotional memories are created, stored and processed. Some memories are very strong anchored in our brains, other memories get coloured or change during the passing of time. De Wandel tries, by using a collage of (digital/analogue) layers of archive pictures (own and found footage), to express the multiple layers of these memories. Fragments from the past loose their context in the present and their attachment to reality gradually fades away.
Amygdala
The amygdala is the part of our brain responsible for the creation, storage and processing of (emotional) memories. The project is still evolving and contains single images, installations, objects, collages that express the layeredness of these memories and how they change or get coloured over time.
Fragments from the past loose their context in the present and their attachment to reality gradually fades away.
So do we know what actually happened and what not? Does our mind play tricks with us?
Time changes everything-it’s the key of our existence.