Simen Johan

A collection of psychologically charged depictions of the natural world represents 15 years of the artist's career, the entire series gathered together in one volume for the very first time. Simen Johan summons a metaphorically dense world into being where human fantasy and nature collides. Simen Johan originally drew attention in the early 1990s by merging digital manipulation with traditional darkroom techniques. Since then, he has been developing a hybrid form of image-making that integrates candidly photographed animals and landscapes with a compositional structuring and conceptual intent typically associated with painting and cinema. As Lyle Rexer pointed out in a 2016 issue of Photograph Magazine: Simen Johan is 'one of the first and best artists to incorporate digital image processing into this creative practice.' In a catalogue essay, David E. Little, Executive Director of the International Center of Photography, proclaims 'Johan's photographs underscore the importance of the creative act in photography, not as an act in itself, but as a means towards a conceptual and narrative goal.' Johan travels near and far to photograph his source material, and can find inspiration anywhere from the local zoo to the jungles of Costa Rica, or the lava fields of Iceland. He then spends countless hours assembling his images captured in these far-flung locations into a unifying whole. The result is an often-unsettling sense of placelessness. We see in this collection images of pigeons flocking toward light like moths (or angels); stripes on a dazzle of Grevy's zebras mesh with the fronds of geographically incongruent palms; two hapless caribou glazed with ice, frozen in a scene that is both tranquil and brutal. Each image reveals poetic and often unexpected relationships that speak to the illusory and multifaceted nature of existence. Tensions between what is revealed and what is concealed, what is alluring and what is menacing, what is fact and what is fiction, both shape and unsettle the scenes. Simen Johan is a 15-year-long project, started in 2005; it is gathered in book form here in its entirety for the very first time.