Simen johan biography definition
Ms Sarah Pickering
- Associate Professor, Fine Art Media
Biography
My research into themes of falsity and deception uses the process of photographic image making and related media as a way of staging, observing, performing, and facilitating in order to examine and explore mediated versions of reality. Central to my research is an intense and repeated scrutiny of the issues raised by such subjects as fakes, tests, hierarchy, science-fiction, explosions, photography, and gunfire. My art research richly contributes to the research culture of the Slade School of Fine Art,
My art research is recognised for its innovative interdisciplinary engagement. I have worked with scientists, the police, pickpockets, the fire service, forensic investigators, historians, and firearms experts in the development of new works. I am a leading figure using this approach within photographic fine art practice, as evidenced by the inclusion of two bodies of work in Manifesta11, European Biennale ‘What People Do For Money.’ (191,995 visitors). My artworks have been exhibited in significant survey exhibitions connecting science and art (Revelations, Science Museum, London 2015 & To The Edge of Time, KU, Leuven 2021) alongside artefacts by Stephen Hawking, and pioneers of photography including Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, Edgerton and Fox Talbot, and interdisciplinary artists Cornelia Parker and Katie Paterson.
As a practising artist my art research, impact, public engagement and outputs are considered to be ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’ within the fine art discipline, as evidenced by their inclusion in significant art collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum of Art USA and the Victoria & Albert Museum UK. As a leading figure in my field of art research my artwork has been exhibited in 71 venues both internationally and nationally in museums, biennales, festivals and galleries, including USA, Australia, Belgium, It
Yossi Milo Gallery Interior, 2012. ©Esto/David Sundberg.
Current Exhibition
Alina Perez
Family Romance
January 16, 2025 - March 8, 2025
Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Family Romance, Alina Perez’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Family Romance opens to the public on Thursday, January 16, with an artist’s reception from 6-8 PM, and will be on view through Saturday, March 8, 2025. Alina Perez’s (b. 1995; Miami, FL) drawings operate on a psychic plane, using an internal emotional logic to create scenes that are altogether new. Using imagination as a plan of action, Perez alters her own closely held recollections to compose surreal tableaux. The artist’s path forward is far from linear, diverting into scenes of tenderness, violence, and eroticism in a search for resolution. Perez’s drawings act as portals; glimpses of alternate and parallel realities in which the artist gives form to emotional sensation and recognizes the true power of fantasy. In Family Romance, Perez escalates this practice towards pivotal personal experiences. The artist’s revisitations of critical memories change their dynamics alongside their content, and across the exhibition, hierarchies of familial and romantic relationships expand, shift, and collapse at will. Especially in weighing the aftershocks of trauma, Perez questions the effects of secrecy, complicity, and disclosure, upending them to find sources of power that motivate her work. The physical world takes newly charged forms in Perez’s practice, and the artist engages deeply with the surroundings and traumatic encounters of her youth in Miami, Florida. Across Family Romance, the artist, her relatives, and loved ones take on new shapes and meanings alongside elements of Floridian urban life and nature. The poetics of the state’s ecology are rife with their own environmental tensions, being at once rich and fragile, precious and endangered, invasive and endemic; Perez positio Back to Issue Forty-Eight BY CAMILLE GUTHRIE Michael Dumanis was born in the former Soviet Union and lived there until his parents were granted political asylum in the United States. His most recent book is Creature (Four Way Books, 2023). He is the author of one previous collection, My Soviet Union, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the co-editor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. The recipient of the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, he lives in Vermont, where he teaches at Bennington College and serves as editor of Bennington Review. *** Camille Guthrie: Please tell us why you chose this remarkable cover art by Simen Johan, Untitled #136 (Foxes), and why you titled the book Creature? Michael Dumanis: Simen Johan is my favorite contemporary photographer! Twenty years ago I was working at Brazos Bookstore in Houston and his collection of photographs, Room to Play, consisting of evocative and disturbing images of children, looking at once self-confident and vulnerably lost, often with digitally manipulated, somewhat terrifying eyes, was prominently displayed on a shelf over the register.Its cover image became the cover image for my first book of poems, My Soviet Union, a child in a slip and fur coat and Russian-style hat clutching a camera in an urban snowfall at twilight. I liked the idea of linking that book with the new one by featuring an image of Simen’s again. In his more recent work, Simen has continued to produce unsettling images of creatures, only the creatures are now animals. I was especially drawn to his photograph of two foxes, seated in a humanlike posture and weeping, with traces of blood on their mouths, amid a desolate though beautiful snowscape, the sky and the ground essentially the same color, the lively orange of the foxes’ fur blaring at the center of the nothingness. I think the knowledge .A Conversation with Michael Dumanis