The Notes on Happiness The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more. Michel de Certau, The Practice of Everyday Life Dejana Vučićević will showcase her works at The Lapidarium Museum in Novigrad, during July and August, consecutively. Created independently of each other, within an eight years span, her two series of photographs are titled respectively Happy Family (2006) and Lost and Found (2013). In line with the classical genre orientation, these two series should be separated. The first is set predominantly in the interiors or sometimes exteriors of houses, while the second one is situated in the surreal landscapes which are rarely intimate and familiar, and mostly consist of decaying lodgings with untended courtyards. If the author decided to present all these photographs within a temporal continuum, as a sort of a whole, a natural question to ask is - where do they correspond? One by one, the first observable thing is the inconsistency of time, in a sense that ten photographs from Happy Family cycle have not been photographed during the same number of occasions. Namely, each of those photographs represents the time in which it wasn't actually created. One can presume that the first photograph from Happy Family series represents the first decade of the last century, while the last one in a row coincides with the previous century’s last decade. Contrary to the general rule of photographic authenticity, which asserts that the photographer is witnessing the time s/he is recording, this cycle is most assuredly breaching that rule. Lost and Found series also abides in some other time, floating on the remnants of the past, lost time. In order to understand the reasons behind these photographs, we have to define the point of view from a position of the quest for their meaning. Let us assume that the directed photography, which posits a family of three members within the style-codified home interiors, intends to point out a change, or else to indicate the actual constant which is confirmed by the time itself, narrating a story by stringing the family album photos. The construed scenes of family happiness carry within themselves a key to both photographic series, justifying the desire to unite them. The exchanges of mise en scènes on each particular photograph invoke the feeling of time's inconstancy, or even of time's transcending into the omnipresence. Namely, the family trio, contrary to the style guidelines for interiors, reveals itself to be of one and the same age, despite the actual time it lives in. One and the same family, in whatever time. The quest for meaning begins by observing the unimportant yet present decorative arrangements, which back the idea of the welfare pertaining to the bourgeois life. The author supports the decoration so the details can arrest the gaze, which, finding nothing significant there, peacefully proceeds from the exterior to interior, from the style to the content. The girl's figure is repeated in both cycles - in the first as a member of a happy family and in the second as a visitor of the noneveryday landscape. Regarding the context of Happy Family's location, we expect to encounter the safety of home, while in the second series we anticipate the playfulness in nature. However, both places convincingly contribute to the feeling of loneliness, alienation and discomfort. Both are inscribed with the subjectivity of the author's gaze, the intention to see the child's figure as alone, within a frame saturated with details. All of which presumes that the observer will first stumble across fashion details, which will lead her/his attention astray. Despite the minutely elaborated frame, the iterated appearance of girl's absent face, side to side with her parents' smiling faces, becomes more clear. We are intuiting the emotion of alienation, concealed under a carpet of tidy, perfect situations and relations, ready to be immortalized. In front of a camera. Though certain evidence is nowhere to be found, house interiors, as shown by Dejana Vučićević, can be a place of disharmony, isolation and futile encounters between children game and adults’ manners. Not knowing whether these are autobiographical elements, we are left to guess how the point of view in both series is actually the seeing of subjective world, seeing which is maladjusted to the generally accepted rules of happiness. Therefrom stems the grasping after the tradition of bourgeois portrait. The latter is a symbolic denotation of bourgeois culture, which the author partially addresses, though in her work the genre guidelines serve as the style figures, rather than as an integral idea. Sabina Salamon Biography Dejana Vučićević graduated from The Faculty for Applied Arts and Design, Belgrade, in 1992. In 1993 she became a member of The Association of Fine Artists and Designers of Serbia and acquired a status of a freelance artist. Vučićević is a visual artist. She did several large solo projects within the fields of design and fashion, such as designer collections, costumes for three feature-length films and one short film. Vučićević does costume design, as well as design for theatre and TV advertisements, and is also engaged in styling for fashion-art editorials and similar ventures.   Regarding the field of multimedia art, she creates conceptual authorial projects which have been realized in the following exhibitions: - 2006 Happy Family, Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade - 2008 Still Lovers, Turkish Bath, Belgrade - 2010 The Awakening, Artget Gallery, Belgrade - 2012 Happy Family, Vžigalica Gallery, Ljubljana - 2013 Lost&Found, KCB Visual Arts Gallery, Belgrade - 2013 Lost&Found, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zrenjanin Two of her artworks were purchased by two prestigious Belgrade museums - The City Museum of Belgrade and The Museum of Applied Arts. One of her artworks was included as a part of Telenor Collection of Contemporary Serbian Art. www.dejanavucicevic.com