French artist Philip Ob Rey has created a series of photographs featuring nightmarish black figures, made of old VHS tapes, roaming the frozen Icelandic landscapes. The photographs are part of a project Philip calls “V”HS Project.
Based in Iceland Ob Rey has a background in the French fashion industry, an experience he carries into his current work: “I used to work in High Fashion (Haute Couture) in Paris, so I wanted all the design, the style, the photography, visual to have this very Luxurious quality”. The “V”HS project was to capture the atmosphere of “a powerful shooting for dark High fashion.”
“That 's why I choose the video tapes, kind of infamous material but I learnt how to transform common things into beautiful jewellery. Trapping lights, dark effect, giving leather or metal effect.”
The desolate landscapes of Iceland is a particularly fitting stage for his work:
“In Iceland I found the perfect ground and atmosphere: the dark and white land of the winter time, the wind from the North, and also the energy of the magma, the Icelandic culture, the beliefs from old time, spirituality and nature.”
He describes the photographs as a story of an “obscure awakening” and a “chaos ordered”. The photographs and nightmarish creatures are also a commentary on our present, “in reaction against the growing dictatorship of the mass media and the unstoppable plastic pollution due to the overconsumption of the new technologies,”
“These sculptural creatures I made, are evolving in eerie and arid post-apocalyptic world. In Iceland, I built a poetic, dark and raw vision of The After, where humankind is not master anymore.”
French artist Philip Ob Rey has created a series of photographs featuring nightmarish black figures, made of old VHS tapes, roaming the frozen Icelandic landscapes. The photographs are part of a project Philip calls “V”HS Project.
Based in Iceland Ob Rey has a background in the French fashion industry, an experience he carries into his current work: “I used to work in High Fashion (Haute Couture) in Paris, so I wanted all the design, the style, the photography, visual to have this very Luxurious quality”. The “V”HS project was to capture the atmosphere of “a powerful shooting for dark High fashion.”
“That 's why I choose the video tapes, kind of infamous material but I learnt how to transform common things into beautiful jewellery. Trapping lights, dark effect, giving leather or metal effect.”
The desolate landscapes of Iceland is a particularly fitting stage for his work:
“In Iceland I found the perfect ground and atmosphere: the dark and white land of the winter time, the wind from the North, and also the energy of the magma, the Icelandic culture, the beliefs from old time, spirituality and nature.”
He describes the photographs as a story of an “obscure awakening” and a “chaos ordered”. The photographs and nightmarish creatures are also a commentary on our present, “in reaction against the growing dictatorship of the mass media and the unstoppable plastic pollution due to the overconsumption of the new technologies,”
“These sculptural creatures I made, are evolving in eerie and arid post-apocalyptic world. In Iceland, I built a poetic, dark and raw vision of The After, where humankind is not master anymore.”
