I MISS YOU (2020-2022)
I MISS YOU is a postcard series of intimate glimpses of quotidian moments taken between 2020 and 2022.
The work considers the thrill of the performance of being alive, the minutiae of time passing, and the elementals of female consciousness as it struggles between the fluidity and the frustrations of motherhood, artistic ambition, domestic incumbencies, restless longing, and thwarted personal and political agency.
For 366 days I wrote to you, strangers, passers-by, acquaintances. I wrote to anyone in the world ravenous for a tendril of contact, an intimate photograph and a good confession.
The project is now complete. Thank you, 366 people from around the world, for participating.
By Katherine Dennis, Independent Curator and Art Critic, October 2021:
“My postcard arrived as the fourth wave of pandemic was on the rise in British Columbia, at the end of the “hot vax summer” that failed to materialize. Weary, as I was, of restrictions but fearful of letting go of the limitations that have kept us safe, I found simple pleasure in receiving correspondence in the mail. The postcard—an artwork by Toronto-based artist Cindy Blažević—felt like a soothing balm to counter the virus’s sting. In an act of generosity, her art tethered me to another human, one who does not live in my household.
Blažević’s series I MISS YOU offers a glimpse into the life of one woman set against the backdrop of a global pandemic. Participants from anywhere in the world are invited to sign up to receive a postcard with a photograph and handwritten note signed with love from the artist. Blažević’s art is now circulating as far afield as China and Guatemala and as near as the local “House with the Fancy Chandelier.”
Punctuated by the inescapable weight of world events—pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, climate crises, attacks on women’s rights—the postcards tell of a single person’s journey through a period of isolation. We observe this artist, mother, human navigate all the confusion with moving beauty and resilience. The invitation to receive a piece of her story taps into our collective desire for connectedness and meaning in a time of great uncertainty and a constant call for distance. The photographs—still lifes, portraits and landscapes infused with the temporal confusion so distinct to this moment—were taken daily during the pandemic’s first year, from March 13, 2020, to March 13, 2021. Over the course of the next year, until March 13, 2022, the artist will pair each image with a daily diaristic entry that merges fiction and memoir, and then send them all out into the world.
Together the postcards form an intimate portrait of the artist as she reflects on her state of mind and the everyday. Reminiscent of Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards (1999), featuring everyday images that reveal the complexity of social life, and with Sophie Calle’s confessional approach to merging one’s own life with fiction, Blažević’s art finds a deeper meaning in the banal. In recording her life and thoughts, she also captures something larger about the cultural psyche of this shared experience. Blažević shows us that when your universe shrinks to your home and those you share it with, you can simultaneously experience it as a magical kingdom filled with joy and unexpected discovery and as a prison of personality clashes and routine. As honest and heartfelt as it is dark, the I MISS YOU series is a timely invitation to find the poetry in our own mess, to see the art in the everyday act of living, to explore the nooks and crannies of our immediate surroundings.“
Cindy Blažević’s research-based practice predominately takes the form of photographs. Deeply invested in activism and social engagement, she has spent years exploring Canada’s penal system, immigration policies and constructions of citizenship. Through both documentary and fiction (such as her creation of the character Yvonne de Jopling), the artist critiques the systems that she operates within. This postcard series offers an unexpected, intimate look into Blažević’s personal life, which is so intertwined with and yet often invisible within her art practice, and which she shares with her three rambunctious children and her partner, Pascal. Blažević has exhibited internationally and was the inaugural Artist in Residence at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto.