Creative director and visual artist Anita Fontaine is known for her futuristic creations which traverse the line between fashion, art, technology and advertising. Her work is like taking a trip through hyper-reality, and her radical approach to digital art and in your face visuals has made her a favourite collaborator of a diverse range of brands, from Louis Vuitton to Mac Cosmetics and Google. Always one to stand out from the crowd, in her native Australia she played in goth hop bands while studying film, photography and video game design. These dark roots are still evident in her work, through her use of ethereal shots, ghostly double exposure imagery and settings permeated with symbolism that could straight out of a gothic novel. All of this clashes with her innovative use of zuse of bright, almost sickly colour palettes.
Since she graduated she has lived and worked all over the world, spending three years as artist in residence at the revolutionary Banff New Media Institute in Canada before setting up an interactive research lab inside the once great advertising agency Modernista in Boston. A move to Amsterdam led her to set up her own boutique agency Champagne Valentine with long-time collaborator Geoffrey Lillemon, whose philosophy was “we create art for brands”.
Fontaine left in 2012 to pursue other projects, and has worked on immersive experiences for Cirque Du Soliel and Google Chrome, as well as with multi-disciplinary collective West Studios. She now runs her own studio in London, creating virtual worlds for her ever expanding metaverse.
As well as mystical influences and rainbow brights, her work also has a grungey, 90s feel. In 2014 she collaborated with the website of hip high culture and fashion mag Dazed Digital to create an experimental film inspired by the decade’s infamous rave culture. The three minute short features the track ‘Flim’ by British electronic musician and composer Aphex Twin and is dubbed ‘Anthem of My Youth’.
"Flim was an anthem in our tropical goth scene as a kid in Australia. It was the song that fixed every terrible rave comedown as soon as you heard it and made everything feel innocent again. I love how it has the sweetness of a nursery rhyme, but it’s actually quite sinister. I wanted to create a little fairytale where the innocence was being shattered by funny monsters and cartoon villains.”
Described as lo-fi fun, the film was made in 72 hours and is filled with glitch effects, dodgy gifs and B-grade horror footage to create an immersive psychedelic experience.
A similar influence can be felt in her campaign for Edun, Bono’s fashion brand, entitled ‘Storytellers and Liars’. Created alongside Lillemon in 2011, the promotion includes soothing yet haunting music and seemingly old fashioned and low budget production values to form trippy, beautifully unreal images, all imbued with an edgy 90s vibe.
Although Fontaine is now based in the UK, her amazing work can be found in museums and galleries around the world, and she regularly updates her Vimeo account with new wonderfully bizarre works
Images: anitafontaine.com, beautifuldecay.com
- Words by Sophia Lloyd - -
