Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is the perfect acronym for the psychedelic world of photographer Claudine Vignes (Dana) alias Lalie Sorbet. Her exhibition “Talking walls” in Centre d’Art, Citadines, which just opened up, is a little taste of what the dimension of her photographic art can be.

A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of spacetime dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways.

In “Talkings walls” you are looking at the photographs of the walls of the Old Port of Pondicherry, but from a close up perspective. As the walls are filled with colored textures and all kind of organisms, what you end up seeing actually does not look like a wall, but more what could be an abstract painting created by the mind under hallucinogens due to the distorted view of objects and reality. The notion of space and time is gone and, like in quantum physics, there is past, present, future and imaginary time – a kind of a space but without the hardening of the mental always at work. It is simply a reality that the naked eye cannot perceive.

The result of this treasure hunt is 20 colourful, distorted and animated photographs where you will discover a whale, a venus, landscapes, a sky, a tornado, an electrical outlet and even one called “nu” resembling strangely the “The origin of the World” by Courbet.

She explains to me that it is her background in educative video games and as a graphic publicist that developed her sense of detail and attention. In both jobs she ended up being an artistic director, she created images. Later her exploration of photography included almost everything, lately extending to portraits and everyday street life which maybe the subject of exhibitions soon to be. In this aspect Lalie Sorbet claims to take a new ownership of art and nature.

This autodidactic photographer likes to take on a subject and dig into it in her own way. Her macrophotography with insects and drops of water were the subjects of previous exhibitions in Auroville and in Chennai and her pictures were chosen for the entire interior design of Dunes, a well known spa close to Pondicherry.

In this “Talking walls” exhibition, the real, unreal and virtual reside side by side and the world and personage of Lalie Sorbet becomes almost extra sensorial. About this quest of extraordinary worlds and regained freedom, she says that her dream is to explore 75% of the brain.

So if you ever had the thought of taking LSD to go to an other dimension of the mind, no need for it, it is right here in “Talking walls” in Auroville.

Chana Corinne for AVartService

TALKING WALLS
Exhibition by Lalie Sorbet
Centres d’art Citadines
From Dec 27th till January 10th,
Open daily 2.00 P.M. to 5.00 P.M
Opening December 27 th., 4.30 to 7.00 P.M.