Irie Wata is a digital collage artist from The Netherlands who creates optical illusions by playing with space, time and gravity in the form of “Art videos” set to music.
Artist Examples
Artist Analysis
In her works Irie Wata uses digital collage techniques to create surreal “Art videos” which often carry a political message. Her videos feature different collages of space images, portraits, war photography and landscapes. They are often created for bands in order to be used as lyric videos and are therefore set to music. Wata creates the videos in a retro style, she uses black-and-white images which are often cut from old images or magazines. These images are laid out in a very exaggerated and abstract way, which doesn’t adhere to any standard rules of proportion.
In her videos she uses bright, contrasting colours so that the different elements stand out against each other. The different layers are cut out so that they can be placed over one-another in the editing phase.
The images are laid over each other in an animation/video editing software such as Adobe After Effects or Premiere Pro. They are then animated using masks and keyframes to create the smooth transitions that can be seen in her videos. This would have required a lot of skill and therefore she had help from an animator named “Someone”.
The videos are designed to create thought around what might at first seem chaotic. The videos are often created with a political meaning behind them, for example in her “Crossfields” art video she contrasts images of quaint villages with images of war graves and soldiers to show the effect of war. The pieces often have quite a slow pace which allows the viewer to really examine what they are watching.
My Edits
