Discover the contemporary work of Helia Mey

Helia Mey is a French artist born in 1999. After a few trips that awakened in her this taste for “elsewhere”, she chose to take root in a new space, which she now defines as a “home” that constitutes her identity: this place out of this world is Liguria, a border region to France located in northern Italy, where artists and witches still meet. At the age of 25, she learned a reality family history of which she knew nothing: a new grandfather, new origins to explore and a new story that she will choose to dress herself in to better embrace her identity. At 25, the tree takes deeper roots: somewhere in Kabyle territory. Helia Mey, whose artistic and reflective work has always been imbued with an immanent interculturality and a need to let "situations" speak, refusing to reduce her art to any technique, any medium, and ultimately to any subject, embracing at the same time all causes and all eras, finds in the reconquest of her identity of woman, a legitimacy to arm herself as an artist of disorder and borders.

Helia Mey is an artist whose artistic practice is part of a strong interculturality. Through her practice and her subjects, she borrows from all forms of artistic expression and accepts this “method” as the foundations of her identity as an artist. She therefore refuses to consider for her practice, only one path open to the creative process.

This painter, photographer and sculptor, considers her artistic universe through the prism of a phenomenological vision of her approach; art nourishing itself as much from the understanding of human artifacts as from the brutal or silent experience of everything that exists and surrounds the artist. Each of her works is a point of view of her relationship to the world and to the sensitive: if her paintings are the expression of her deepest intimacy (they are constructed automatically and instinctively and she gives up searching for their meaning, remaining hermetic in the face of the word of her unconscious), her photographs are on the contrary the expression of a form of collective consciousness that is expressed in the play of perceptions.

Trained in Philosophy and sensitized by her family history to the question of mental illness, the artist has chosen to make the question of the “perception of reality” and the interplay of the collective conscious and unconscious, the fertile ground for her artistic and philosophical approach.

Helia Mey seeks to revisit, through a photographic method, the contrast that forms between the subjectivity of the experience of reality and the value that we give to human perception to corroborate certain experiences - how to grasp, artistically and philosophically, the performative value of the collective discourse that is based on the particular experience.

His photographic proposal is a play between three perceptions of reality (Reality, the artist's gaze, the observer who introduces himself into the artist's subjectivity and surrounds him with his own). which are apprehended in the construction of the final image carrying meaning - the image is then the object of the encounter between the conscious and the unconscious, the intimate and the collective.

Helia Mey, directs her approach towards these details of the immediate environment which condition our perception of reality and which influence our sensitive perceptions. It is by capturing the detail and the passage to immobility that the way is opened to the game and the subjectivization of reality; the artist plays with the image, to “give an account” of what she has perceived at a given moment and it is in the observation of the image by the spectator that a new meaning, a new story, a new subjectivity is formed.

Helia Mey experiments through the intermediary of the game, the biases of perceptions which lead to a metamorphosis of reality, to the suggestion of fantasies, and sometimes to the beginnings of psychosis.