Sylva Francová (1973) is an artist working with digitally manipulated images, above all photographs and video. Her work is based on two main themes. The first examines groups of peoples or individuals in a specific environment, while the second deals with the problematic of these places. Francová’s approach is not spontaneous. Instead, her activities are thought out over the long term. She collects everyday items in her archive, and after a certain period of time has elapsed their typical character begins to form clusters. She then layers several semantic levels into one image. Her work is not documentary in the original sense of the word. It penetrates people and places through the time and levels that appear during this investigation.
Her best known cycles include Daily Stories (2007–8), Family Talks (2007), Views (2005–6), Portraits of Women (2003–2004), Reality Show (2003), Time in Town (2002–3) and Disappeared Worlds (2002–3).
Francová mainly uses time-lapse photography to create her montages. The scattered masses of people in the streets of New York in the cycle Time in Town, the group portrait of young people sitting on a sofa in a living room watching reality shows bored, night after night, or the best known cycle of photography Portraits of Women use sequential recording within a specific time.
Portraits of Women poses questions as to how the personal space is filled and time is spent by women of various ages and social groups. This is panoramic photography created by digital manipulation. For more than a year the artist shot the banal activities performed by the women in their households and then reassembled them into a single image. Although we encounter computer-generated illusions of reality often in art, those of Sylva Francová have one feature that stands out from the conventional utilisation of this type of montage. They do not seek to mystify, they do not want to persuade the viewer of a “new reality”, but to create a distinctive testimony. A small everyday story is contained in each of them. Francová does not try to drown out the contents of the contents of the image using visual effects. Tension is created through the question mark that is the interval between individual activities. The photographic sequence is a story with a disturbed history, and the unspoken is space for the viewer’s imagination. A cycle directly linked to Portraits of Women is Daily Stories. The form remains the same, but the target group of people being observed is expanded.
The video Family Talks literally problematises interpersonal communication, in this case dialogue. The conversation between two sisters on a sofa in a living room is shot in a neutral manner. Francová lays emphasis on the facial expressions and gestures of the people speaking. The words and phrases become movements in their own right, and otherwise the video is silent.
One of the few works in which we do not see the visible presence of people is the series Views. These are views taken from the windows of apartment blocks. The movement that pervades the photographs takes place along a spatial rather than a temporal axis. On each floor the artist took photographs of the landscape outside, and from these shots created a new apartment black, this time with a strange perspective. In all of Francová’s works we find a strange contradiction between the completely known and something deformed, cold and alienating, and this undermining of everyday experience attracts our attention.
