JUSTINE BLAU

 

The Circumference of the Cumanán  Cactus, 2010, Photography, Duratran Lightbox (Series of 9), 1200 x 900 mm

With the support of the Ministère de la Culture, de l'Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche, Luxembourg

Justine Blau is a visual artist working between London and Luxembourg, creating works that explore the visual language of photography and its usage in its vernacular context. She is also interested in the influence of culture and how it shapes our habits and our environment. Her works borrow from the world of spectacle, museums artefacts and the realm of childhood. Following a recent MA at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts she has been developing works concerned with the yearning for exoticism and foreignness encountered in the West, looking into the ways it is conveyed through culture, the media and tourism. Her work has been exhibited around Europe with recent exhibitions including Ecotone, CNA (Centre National d’Audiovisuel), Luxembourg, Moving Worlds, Carré Rotondes, Luxembourg, Studio, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, ALT+1000, High Altitude, photography in the mountains, Rossinière and Normalcy Bias, Listros Gallery, Berlin. She has co-curated shows in Luxembourg and the UK; and is one of the founding members of ArtRole, an organisation developing cultural exchanges between the Middle East and the United Kingdom.

Justine often uses photography in her practice, as she is am drawn towards the medium’s complex relationship with the real and its ability to bridge fiction and reality. She is interested in its vernacular use and history. She tends to place the medium in relation to ancient illusionary and optical techniques such as panoramas, dioramas and peep- show theatres, interested in establishing a comparison between old illusionary practices and today’s concerns on the simulacra. Her current work is concerned with the process of traveling and our yearning for exoticism, she uses fabricated images and narratives that each location carries to create complex montages and collages that simulate a landscape, taking the shape of large sculptures and photographs. Her work refers to an archetypal place, alluding to the myth of origin and our conception of virgin territories. The Circumference of the Cumanán Cactus is an invitation to the voyage. Originally a

commission for Manchester Piccadilly Station, Metrolink platform, the work constitutes of a series of nine images featuring wild and exotic landscapes of far-flung territories. These natural environments bear little signs of human presence, hinting towards the possibility of an untouched land, in its primal state. What at first appear to be picturesque views of sunburned deserts, lush jungle and puffing volcanoes, are actually constructed fantasy worlds created by means of photographs found on the web. The images are three-dimensional collages of cutout photos, photographed, creating an optical illusion. The pictures, by their very nature,

sway between the worlds of reality and fiction, culture and nature. They mimic the

visual language of tourism billboards, playing with the striking imageries associated to travel, fulfilling our thirst for exoticism and our quest for paradise-like places, devoid of signs of modernity.The project is also an exploration of visual imageries connected to the very act of 'traveling'. The images take as inspirations, drawings and paintings made during expeditions to new worlds, with the like of Columbus and Cook, a time when Europeans started trawling throughout the world in search of new territories. Visual accounts from the outside world steadily returned to the homeland by travelers avid to share what their eyes had seen; these images becoming part of our collective imagination, shaping our views of foreign lands. This tradition has persisted until nowadays, with the 18-19th centuries' scientific expeditions under figures like Darwin and Humboldt, the European Grand Tour by romantic painters and writers and modern tourism and the holiday snapshots. The works is concerned with the representations of the ‘outside’ world when returned

'home', these images working as testimonies and scientific proofs, but also as exotic

memorabilia or subjects of myths.