Maitha Demithan
Aiyal, Sanawat and To The Moon
In perfecting the technique of using a flatbed printer to take multiple images of her subjects, Demithan combines the mechanical with the emotional in her deconstructed portraits.
Aiyal
2012
Scanography
142 x 170 cm
Sanawat
2010
Scanography
180 x 144 cm
To The Moon
2009
Scanography
180 x 122 cm
About
Maitha Demithan has painstakingly digitally knitted together flatbed scans of body sections to produce luminous images of her Emirati family.
To The Moon and Sanawat are portraits of her nieces and nephew, and in Aiyal the form of her father guides her brother who holds a falcon, a traditional hunting animal in the Emirates.
Of the scanography technique she employs, Demithan says: ‘The human figure has always been of interest to me, and this unusual way of looking at it, especially with the absence of depth of field and 3D form, I have found it to be like a form of documentation, as if the figure was a document.’
Demithan also considers her process a method of painting with light. The layers of construction and deconstruction are a contrast to the immediacy of digital photography and prevailing Instagram culture.
Presented as part of: Experimenta Recharge: 6th International Biennial of Media Art, which toured Australia in 2014–2016.
The Artist
Maitha Demithan
Maitha Demithan works across photography, scanography, drawing, painting and photo transfer to weave together scans of her Emirati community, traditional cultural imagery and contemporary practice.