September 15 - News
Simen Johan – Upcoming exhibitions
In his photographs, Simen Johan explores darkly the human proclivity towards fantasy and our attempts, knowing or otherwise, to craft alternate realities for ourselves. Merging traditional photographic techniques with digital methods, Johan creates each of his images from as many as one hundred negatives, having first constructed or discovered each element and photographed it on film. Across his body of work, the viewer is urged to ponder the relationship between the real and the artificial or imagined.
In an interview with National Geographic, contemporary artist and photographer Simen Johan states: “Some of my work emulates traditional nature photography, and there’s some intended irony in that. But there’s also sincerity, because I really do enjoy making beautiful images of nature. Beauty alone, though, doesn’t echo my experience of the world, which is more complex and multilayered, so in my versions of ‘nature photography’ I also incorporate darker qualities. … The work is multilayered and open-ended, with biblical as well as political references scattered throughout, but ultimately it’s a visceral response that I’m after.”
Simen Johan will be exhibiting at:
Bethel University, St Paul, Minneapolis, on Sept. 17 – Dec. 18, 2015
Minneapolis Institute of Art, on Mar. 19, 2015 – May 1, 2016
(Talk: Oct. 1, 6.30 pm)
See more of Simen’s work here.
