MONICA ALVES DE CARVALHO > DIGITAL CREATIVE
Monica Alves de Carvalho’s passion for photography, and the arts in general, goes a long way back to getting inspired by family travels and using her disposable camera on holidays. She started experimenting with photomanipulation giving a ‘second life’ to her otherwise ordinary travel photos and challenging the common perception on digital photographs. She uses part of the human body to tell the stories of exotic and otherworldly landscapes that evoke a sense of fun and surrealism.
One day, a good friend of mine introduced me to Adobe Photoshop, and it was a game changer: thousands of photo-editing possibilities and ideas opened for my creative, starving mind. I could finally edit the eye colours, copy and paste bits of photos here and there, use cool filters, I discovered the eraser and the stamp tool… I’ve been self-teaching Photoshop for over five years now, and I learn new things everyday”
After college, I left my hometown to study in the UK (BA History of Art in Leeds, then a MA Design for Communication in London). During those years, I juggled between essays and photoshop. I couldn’t wait to come up with a new photomontage idea.
Around 2015, after getting really good feedback from family and friends, I realised that doing photomontages could perhaps become more than just a hobby. I created an Instagram profile in 2016, started selling prints online, and exhibited my photomontages for the first time, in London at Sprouts Art Gallery.
I moved to Berlin in 2016 with my boyfriend, he appears in a LOT of my photomontages. We wanted to start a new life in this German city, where the rent was cheap, the startup scene vibrant and the art exciting. Berlin is just awesome for anything art-related. I’ve been given many exhibitions opportunities, which I am extremely grateful for. I’ve also met a lot of other artists and have evolved greatly in my artistic style.
I am obsessed with anything related to the surreal, the imaginary, the impossible, the illusion. I see the ‘real’ world as finite, while the ‘surreal’ is infinite and full of potential. I initially drew inspiration from Surrealist painters and photographers. The artistic practice of these early inspirations were crucial for the concepts I use in my work. These artists made me think differently, made me question art in general. Later influences include the short film An Andalusian Dog, the surreal collages of Eugenia Loli, the provocative digital manipulations of Johnny Smith, and the combo photos of Stephen McMennamy. Literature-wise, I am fascinated with Boris Vian’s surreal book L’Écume Des Jours (Froth on the Daydream), and Stephen LaBerge’s Lucid Dreaming.
My USP is that I use photos taken exclusively by myself. This makes my art 100% unique. When I have an idea for a new photomontage, I check my portfolio of images on my laptop. I have thousands of photos taken during travels, of landscapes and friends and family. I usually combine two photos together but don’t always have both photos already in my collection of images. For example, when I came up with the idea for my artwork ‘Intimasea’, I already had the photo of the beach in the Bahamas taken in 2007 but didn’t have a photo of a stomach. So I took a photo of my belly and transferred it to my laptop to start putting both photos together. My work contains a lot of ‘bodyscapes’. I enjoy combining human body parts with natural landscapes because I see an interesting relationship there. I see the human body as a landscape. Lips are but delicate hills, tongues are winding paths, eyelashes are forests, hair is lots of tiny waves of an ocean, hands are soft and warm like sand.
