evidence of things unseen

E-MONA:  Here's edgy, here's current!   - Keri Guten Cohen, Detroit Free Press 

 

E-MONA:  Fresh art from all over the world!  - Real Detroit Weekly

 

Simen Johan: Children's fanciful, terrifying inner lives are made disconcertingly real through Johan's digital manipulation of actual and imaginary people, places, and things.   - The New Yorker

 

E-MONA and Simen Johan:

 

Ten years ago, the Museum of New Art (MONA) came up with a simple idea based on the instant technology of the Internet: MONA put out a call for artwork to be e-mailed to the museum and got more than 1,000 responses.  The show features 50 young artists from 24 countries.  Their work was professionally enlarged and printed on state-of-the art digital printers.

 

Now, in the first decade of the 21st century, MONA is at it again. This time around, the museum has targeted some of the best photographers of their generation and has invited them to email entire bodies of work to be presented in Detroit.

 

First of these is Simen Johan. Johan, born in Norway in 1973,  who darkly explores the human proclivity towards fantasy and our attempts, knowing or otherwise, to 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.