Sandrine Arons

www.sandrinearons.com sarons

ARTIST

BIO

Sandrine Arons is a French-American photographic artist based in the south of France. She was born and raised in a small town 50 miles west of Atlanta, Georgia in the United States. The challenge of having one foot in each culture has been a driving force in Sandrine’s photographs as they often draw on her experience of belonging to two fundamentally different cultures; oftentimes in opposition.

Sandrine received an MFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2015 after receiving Master’s degrees in both French Literature in 2010 and Psychology in 1997. It was during her time at SCAD that she came to understand her innate yearning to bridge these disciplines through her studies around personal writing, self-knowledge and imagery. Her studies and publications on journal writing and self-growth, Holocaust memoirs and diaries and 20th century French authors’ personal narratives led her to explore the concept of a visual autobiography and what that means from both an artistic and therapeutic perspective. Using her own life and images lays the groundwork for further studies in this area that she hopes to examine more deeply in the coming years.

Sandrine’s work has been shown in galleries and museums internationally and she has produced two solo exhibitions of her work in the United States and in France. She has received several awards for her work including Grand Prize Winner in Travel Photography for PDNedu in 2012 and the 2014 SPE Student Award Grant. She moved to France from the US in 2019 and is enjoying discovering new places and new inspirations.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“Frontiers: A Multicultural Journey through Photographs” offers a visual representation of my experience of multiculturalism, depicting an inner world of multiple languages, religions and cultural landscapes embedded in the mind as fragmented memories in search of wholeness. Growing up between France and the United States with frequent travels worldwide greatly influenced my vision and understanding of the world. Culturally, I am French, American, Algerian; raised among Jews, Atheists and southern Baptists; married to a Muslim and the mother of child who will carry all these cultures with him into a new generation. Because I fit into multiple molds of culturally defined identities, I find myself more of an observer than a participant; revising, editing and melting into the landscape. When home is everywhere and nowhere there is an incessant mental revision that makes reality ambiguous and the search for coherence becomes an instinctual reconstruction of memory through the fusion of place and time.

Influenced by an aesthetic and theoretical framework that is inspired by my readings of Hélène Cixous and Anaïs Nin as well as a childhood fascination with the work of René Magritte, these images place doubt on the perceived object, rendering them poetic yet strangely disturbing in their inability to be defined. Hidden in our world are multitudes of other worldly possibilities that cannot be perceived without a deconstruction. In that vein, these diaristic images seek to deconstruct the visual vocabulary in which we feel so comfortable. These photographs produce a visual narrative that I liken to feminine writing as conceptualized by Cixous. They are non-linear, fluid, with silences and disruptions that transgress the phallocentric order, remaining open and borderless. They are the visual representation of hybrid, interlaced, surrealistic landscapes that melt together in the same vein as the cultures that now inhabit my psyche, inviting the viewer into a hermeneutic circle of visual and cultural exploration.

Rusted Sunrise, edition of 5, photograph (archival pigment print), 23x35in