Positive Illusion

Year: 2009
Technique: ink on paper, 21 x 29,7 cm

A series of 37 drawings through which I address the contemporary subjectivity intertwined with pursuit of happiness, self-help and pop psychology and the aesthetics of advertising in ironic way. I use motives borrowed from stock photographs offered through the online databases with a recognizable value to marketing and advertising designers and combine them with psychological tests evaluating life orientation, level of hope, satisfaction with life, subjective happiness and similar personal characteristics.

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In the series of drawings Vesna Bukovec took texts that she has found in various psychological tests on positive life orientation and placed them in a dialogue with images that she has taken from commercial internet photo archives. The drawings are reduced to simple lines and thus successfully complement the ‘thinness’ of the written statements/questions. The selection of images offers additional irony to the accompanying texts, the effect of which is emphasised by the en face portraits that are deformed into spooky grimaces with broad smiles, which make them function as masks in the game of forced happiness.

“Taking images from commercial internet photo archives was also not a coincidental choice. This places the work in the same line as other works by Vesna Bukovec that treat the laws of consumer culture and its influence upon the contemporary individual. The self-help culture and dictate of positive life orientation can successfully be perpetuated in the contemporary consumer society in which the individual needs innumerable means in order to fulfil her/his goal: self-fulfilment and happy life. However, because it is impossible to achieve a wholesome and harmonious identity, the individual constantly has new products and services at her/his disposal, that will hopefully lead her/him to the fulfilment of the endless task that she/he has to believe will end successfully.”

Excerpt from the text The only thing under my control is my attitude towards life by Urška Jurman
[full text (eng) / besedilo (slo)]

Revised Life Orientation

Subjective Happiness

Hope

Satisfaction with Life

Positive Affirmations

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Vesna Bukovec, The Only Thing I Can Control Is My Attitude Towards Life / Edina stvar, ki jo imam pod nadzorom, je moj odnos do življenja, Miklova hiša Gallery, Ribnica, SI, exhibition view, 2009

Vesna Bukovec, The Only Thing I Can Control Is My Attitude Towards Life

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U3 – 6th Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia: An Idea for Living. Realism and Reality in Contemporary Art in Slovenia, Museum of Modern Art (Moderna galerija), Ljubljana, SI, opening view, 2010

U3 opening