Rachel de Joode

Work

After graduating, de Joode began working with photographs and short films that eventually evolved into sculptures that blurred the line between digital representation and an object. De Joode's work can be seen as a version of ephemeral reality, a surface or texture that can be seen as tactile but not felt because what appear to be sculptural materials are photographs. When she chooses to combine these photographs with actual materials, the illusion is magnified and a new form of naturalness is created as product of the artificial and the physical.

Images of de Joode's collaboration with Donna Huanca began circulating on internet in 2010. Conjunction was an interpretation of an astrological event that involved two performers moving through an installation as if practicing some forgotten ritual. De Joode's interest in the relationship between photography, physical reality and illusion appear in the documentation of the installation/performance. De Joode said that the internet influenced her in the way she perceives and processes visual images. For her, the photograph becomes a tool for the mediation of physical experience with matter. In effect, the networked documentation of an image becomes the artwork.

In her 2016 exhibition at Galerie Christophe Gaillard in Paris, de Joode explored the relationship between, photography, internet and her sculptural objects. A self-taught sculptor, de Joode had started working in three dimensions by making still lifes, photographing and arranging objects and thinking about the semiotics of objects. At a certain point de Joode stopped photographing her "things" (a manner she chooses to identify her work to avoid categorization) and started thinking of the art gallery as a stage that was meant to be photographed, documented and distributed through internet.

In the exhibition Instead of Pieces, a Play, (Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, 2018), de Joode, now as an artist protagonist sets up a stage in the middle of the gallery with actors dressed as artists presenting the exhibits. On the double walls hang small ceramic nude figurines representing the artist while anonymous arms pierce the walls to hold sculptural objects. The whole combines literal performance with virtual and real textures and photographic assemblages.

De Joode's Museum exhibitions include Myths of the Marble (2017) at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (ICA) and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Rachel de Joode, Flat Nature / Surface Bodies (2017) Fort Vijfhuizen, Amsterdam, Gestures of Tomorrow (2016) at Kunstverein Nürnberg and Metabolism (2015) at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome