Interviews
Carol Camp
Carol Camp was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1995. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, she experimented with digital and analogue photography, collages, as well as digital photo manipulation and web design. She moved to Los Angeles at 18 years old and attended the New York Film Academy, where she produced, wrote and directed short films. After graduating, she worked in Hollywood on music video sets as an art director, and made a living as a film colorist on short and feature films for over 4 years. Meanwhile, she also studied Studio Arts at West Los Angeles College, diving deeper into art making with drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Now, Carol lives in São Paulo and works mostly with photography manipulation, video art, paintings, and poetry.
What type of art do you produce? What is your art style?
I work mostly with photo manipulation, paintings, and video art. I also write poetry.
What made you want to produce this type of art?
I attempt to eternalize the present, our facticity, our pseudo-freedom that is confined within the bounds of our reality. I use a lot of bright colors, as that’s how the present looks to me - overwhelmingly clear. I also work with abstraction and the disintegration of images, as they represent the way I see the passing of time, the fading of memories, all the impossibilities that I will never get to experience.
What do you enjoy about your field of work?
Connection. Knowing that, as long as I keep making art, I will be understood. Maybe not understood by people I see on a day-to-day basis, and maybe not by anyone I will ever meet in my lifetime. But I will be understood by someone, maybe one person, who will find my words or my images in a hundred years or so. And who will feel understood, too. That connection is something I crave, and something I will never give up on. I want my tiny reality, with its flaws and all, to outlive me. I just need a way out of this finitude that time seems to force upon us.
What messages/feelings do you want to express through your art?
I want people to be aware. To be present. Here, here, here. Now. I want them to understand what it all means, and recognize all of the other versions of reality that had to be sacrificed for this moment. This awareness allows me to see beauty in even the most painful moments, and I’m just doing my due diligence by sharing it.
Why is art important to you?
Art is the purest form of human expression. It is - or can be - a genuine look into experiences that are universal and ubiquitous. You can have a closer relationship with a painter who passed away two hundred years ago than with a family member you see everyday. It’s magical, really.
