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szilviabolla@gmail.com
Szilvia Bolla is a Scotland based Hungarian fine art photographer & video artist. She explores the relations between natural symbols, mythological archetypes, landscape photography and experimental digital media while traveling through wild, blooming gardens and nocturnal void deserts.
She uses the methods of traditional and digital lens based media, creative-destructive tactics, bends images in the aesthetic features of both the natural and algorithmic space and produces works that bear a heavy historic mark but are also out of time.
‘I first saw her pictures four years ago when I found her site. Couldn’t figure out what she was doing. Was she a photshop pro, or she was experimenting with materials that I didn’t even know of? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that she did something new, that I haven’t ever seen before. Blurred, layered, stretched her objects, mixed colors and found a way to capture them in a sensitive and intelligent way no one else did. At that point we were on the edge of opening a new exhibition space downtown, and I immediately knew we found our first exhibitor. So I wrote her, but she rejected us, saying that she feels a little bit immature for a solo yet (she was 17). Three years later I teamed up with a bunch of artist to make a post apocalyptic collection. This time she was the one who contacted us, wanting to borrow some of our pieces for a shooting. I was psyched, so I asked her to visit us at the studio. She came in, sat on a chair with her head tilted down, eyes fixed on the wooden floor and we started talking about video games, experimental electronica and a future fantasy apocalypse. We shot our first project together a couple weeks later in an extreme rush as we had to send out a lookbook for a New York client. We didn’t even see what was happening, just dressed the model up and down, and when we scrolled through the images she made, I fell off my chair. I couldn’t wake up from the excitement that this alien reached out to us, and there we sat looking at pictures of the things we’ve been working on for half a year. I envisioned a strong image how I would want to represent our products, and she didn’t shoot a lookbook, but a series of masterpieces. Next week we teamed up again to shoot a portrait video of our crew. We were walking to a location and on the other side of the street a child burst out in a humongous cry which Szilvia answered with a hardcore scream. I knew I will have to convince her somehow to work with me permanently. During summer we started shooting our first music video and wherever we’ve been to – the shore of the Danube in great storms to capture the rapid waters and dancing willows, the zoo to catch up with the seals or a techno party to play with her prisms on the flashing lights - she always found the perfect angles and was ready to come up with ideas even at the last minute of our trips. With her, you just stand back and watch as she connects with the scenery. Once we just finished shooting clouds and hills at a shores and was packing up to leave as we already had what we came for. We had to walk through a small forest to get back to the car. It was getting dark and she lifted up her camera to capture the lilac sky through the crowns of the trees and it instantly became a story. We stopped in the middle of the windy forest and just watched the slow, dark tale she was telling us in great silence. She is discreet, doesn’t talk much, but ones she mentioned that she is going to move to Scotland as she found a professor there to admire: “He goes out to the open sea with this small boat, looking for cold, unknown islands. This is exactly what I want to do.” And you know she will. Her passion for the freezing, abandoned cliffs, thousand year old, snow-covered volcanoes and deep blue seas drove her to a cross country tent-trip in Iceland and to the chilly Scottish hills with dark caves, and every single time she comes back with hundreds of astonishing, beautiful images, then she sits at the computer for weeks to play with them and create her otherwordly visions. She managed to find a balance between nature and the high tech, so they can live in perfect symbiosis. Not everyone would be capable of such, but she is a hyper intelligent, calm, punctual, discreet and serious woman with spot on humor and hands down the best, most sensitive photographer I have ever met. It is always an honor to work with talented people, but the greatest one is to work with Szilvia.’
-Dark Matter Productions
‘I like Szilvia. She is a mysterious, modest creature with deeply sitting dark eyes, in the last year she has been busy capturing the northern seas and cold landscapes from Iceland to Scotland in her blissful, Dante’s Inferno short of way. Crazy calm. Not so in your face. Something tells me there is more to come very soon.’
-Nero Homme
