SMU's Pollock Gallery Presents Simen Johan's "Until the Kingdom Comes"

SMU's Pollock Gallery Presents Simen Johan's "Until the Kingdom Comes" Posted: 23 Aug 2011 10:29 PM PDT Dallas, TX.- The Pollock Gallery of the Division of Art at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts is proud to present “Simen Johan: Until the Kingdom Comes,” an exhibition by renowned photographer Simen Johan, from August 29th through October 8th. Born in Norway in 1973 and raised in Sweden, Johan has lived and worked in New York City since 1992. He has received international recognition for his enigmatic large-scale photographs that investigate the often-uneasy relationship between the natural world of animals and the confusion and chaos created by human activity through his hauntingly beautiful scenes of animals seemingly adrift in dreamlike landscapes.  The exhibit will include works shown in the recent Simen Johan exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn., and several works from private collections. In an essay that accompanied the catalogue for the Nashville show, Mark Scala, chief curator for the Frist Center, wrote, “Johan’s images are completely without people….Yet the works clearly relate to human processes, beliefs, and illusions. The presentations are staged, with animals posing expressively for the camera like actors. Questions of authenticity versus artificiality arise when one recognizes that these are not all animals living in their natural habitats. Some were photographed on location in zoos or wildlife parks, farms, and museums, others show roadkill or taxidermied specimens, posed and Photoshopped into landscape, still others were taken in the wild. Which are alive, and which are uncanny imitations of life? Such ambiguity is symptomatic of the universal dualisms that give life its sense of being contingent, unfixed.” 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 his most recent images, from the series "Until the Kingdom Comes", Johan depicts animals in scenarios where their actions or demeanor mirror human conventions. The images allude to our inclination to anthropomorphize and domesticate what we see and find around us, and they speak to realms of emotion, our fears and desires, rather than reason. In his earlier work Johan explored the unique relationship that children have with the unknown, constructing complex photographic worlds that seem to grow wild from young imaginations. In some images the children are prominently featured, wrapped up in acts of play or ritual as the makers of their own worlds, while in others they've vanished completely, leaving only the enigmatic traces of their mischief. Simen Johan's work has been widely exhibited internationally, and is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Cleveland Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and other major institutions. Johan's first monograph, Room to Play, was published by Twin Palms in 2003. Born in Norway and raised in Sweden, Johan earned his B.F.A at the School of Visual Arts, in New York, where he currently resides. The Meadows School of the Arts, formally established in 1969 at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, has achieved prominence as one of the foremost arts education institutions in the United States. The Meadows School of the Arts offers instruction in advertising, art, art history, arts entrepreneurship and arts management, communication studies, dance, film and media arts, journalism, music and theatre. The goal of the Meadows School of the Arts, as a comprehensive educational institution, is to prepare students to meet the demands of professional careers. It is also committed to providing an ongoing opportunity for all SMU students to grow in the understanding and appreciation of the arts. The Meadows School of the Arts serves the public as a significant cultural center by presenting more than 400 events annually for the Dallas community and surrounding region. The cultural and intellectual partnership SMU shares with Dallas continues to flourish, and Dallas citizens form a devoted audience for the more than 400 music, dance and theatre performances, opera productions, and art exhibitions that the Meadows School of the Arts presents each year.  The Meadows Museum houses one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Spanish art outside of Spain. The museum presents major works dating from the Middle Ages to the present, including masterpieces by some of the world’s greatest painters: El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera, Murillo, Goya, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. Highlights of the collection include Renaissance altarpieces, monumental Baroque canvases, exquisite Rococo oil sketches, polychrome wood sculptures, Impressionist landscapes, modernist abstractions and a comprehensive collection of the graphic works of Goya. The museum, located at 5900 Bishop Boulevard at the entrance to the SMU campus, also includes a gift shop, education areas and public event spaces, and offers membership and volunteer opportunities along with a range of public programs throughout the year. The museum also includes the Elizabeth Meadows Sculpture Collection featuring major works by such modern masters as Rodin, Maillol, Lipchitz, Henry Moore, David Smith and Claes Oldenburg. Sculptures are displayed both indoors and outside on the museum plaza. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.smu.edu/Meadows