WIDE SHOTS

Joke Hansen

For Wide Shots, Joke Hansen continued to work on the existing series of works on paper “Between canyons and deserts” (2021). She edited her own landscape photos or images found online and in magazines by adding painted “blocks”. This approach stems from Hansen's attempt to translate quick and smaller thinking exercises on paper into a physical space.

The once painterly visual blocks become large, fabric-covered objects that seem to float in and in front of a landscape. Sometimes the painted backgrounds have something romantic/mystical, other times they are literally romanticized landscape photos.

For these “backgrounds,” Joke Hansen uses dream images such as clichéd poster images or images from her own extensive photo archive. The works “Sunset” and “War & peace (at sea)” refer directly to some of William Turner's works in which the contrast between utopia and destruction raises existential questions. A desire and an obstruction to that desire.

For example, in the two images “Mom” and “Dad,” Hansen used photos of her parents posing in a nearby forest for the background. We only see the environment in which they are posing. Their presence is literally and figuratively overshadowed by fabric-covered shapes that refer to the Rorschach test, used in psychoanalysis to assign character traits to the patient based on the interpretation of these “inkblots".

Wide Shots shows a number of eclectically composed images that, through the choice of materials, take on the function of different layers of paint and textures. For example, a painted line is replaced by a fabric-covered beam and a painted oval surface becomes an aluminum cut-out. By making the painterly actions formally real and therefore more monumental, they increasingly acquire a sculptural character.

The cut-outs create openings and 'portals' to 'other spaces' on the one hand, and an obstruction, blocking or disruption of the image on the other.