- Nichole Velasquez
- Freya
- Multiple Exposed diapositive film photography
- 18.75 x 27.5
Freya was created in 2011 as an analogue, multi‑exposed film photograph made in Germany on a silver mirror plate. The image emerges from overlapping exposures that fuse time, light, and gesture into a single reflection. I first developed this series while documenting the construction site of the European Central Bank, exploring how new forms rise from the remnants of the old. Amid this environment of transformation, the figure of Freya appeared, fragmented yet radiant, suspended between past and future within a construction site series.
In Norse mythology, Freya is both a goddess of love and war, fertility and loss. In this work she becomes a guardian of dual states; a presence that holds creation and decay in balance. Her fractured reflection echoes the mirrored surface of the plate itself, inviting viewers to see themselves within her shifting form.
This piece later formed part of a wider collaboration that led me to Monaco and to new intersections between visual art, theatre, and dance beginning in 2013. Freya stands as the first in a developing series exploring human myth through analogue processes in the unfolding Second Machine Age. She is a meeting of spirit, history, and the contemporary gaze. Her gaze, fixed and steadfast, carries the burden of all histories, a silent reckoning that is unable to be turned away from. Pressing urgently toward a future still to be shaped. The potency of her visage is not merely in what it reveals, but in the storm of time it summons: an eternal dialogue between spirit, history, and what lies beyond a once vibrant crown circling her brow. A black halo, fractured yet glowing around her gaze.
- Collections: Nichole Velasquez