Helen Westergren - Weekly Artist Post

Birthe Pointek

 Birthe Piontek is an Canadian artist who works primarily in photography but also sculpture and installation. She presumably works in digital formats because it is not otherwise stated. She is not a subject specific photography, choosing to combine still lifes with her compelling portraiture.
Pointek's work focuses a great deal on identity and using her work to better understand it. Her series Lying Still is composed solely of self-portraits and supplementary images as a method of her understanding her constantly changing identity. She often chooses subjects that are interacting with some type of self-discovery and uses her photography to map this change. Lying Still is an ongoing project, that will continue to change and evolve as she also does. In another work Sub Rosa, Piontek looks at the lives of hyper-emotional teenagers in an attempt to process this visceral and confusing time.
Piontek's work excites me in many different ways. Initially, I am just captivated by the images she is producing. While some are unsettling, they always catch my attention and powerful visual language. Not only is it this impactful image generation, but it also deals with physical interventions to different spaces, something I deal with in my own sculpture often. Her work uses objects in a way that really interests me and I am excited to implement into my own experimentation.