Vonda Dejesus (°1991, Chicago, United States) creates media artworks and media art. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, Dejesus wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave.
Her media artworks appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, How to get back lost love past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By referencing
Black magic for love - Love Samrat romanticism, grand-guignolesque black humour and symbolism, her works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
Her works are often classified as part of the new romantic movement because of the desire for the local in the unfolding globalized world. However, this reference is not intentional, as this kind of art is part of the collective memory. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, she creates work through labour-intensive processes which can be seen explicitly as a personal exorcism ritual. They are inspired by a nineteenth-century tradition of works, in which an ideal of ‘Fulfilled Absence’ was seen as the pinnacle.
Her works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves.
