géraldine jeanjean
rock-paper-roots
21 June 2020 - 18 July 2020
Géraldine Jeanjean’s layered images are situated in and around the French village of Aumont (Massif Central), where her grandmother grew up and where she regularly stays in the family home. This area plays a central role in Jeanjean’s poetic installation on show at Bradwolff Projects.
While her grandmother’s memories of Aumont are fading with dementia, her children are discovering this very same world. Aumont became a mythical place for Jeanjean, where the past and present blend into a single moment. This twilight zone between time and culture has fused desires and memories into a reality of its own, which Jeanjean sought to capture in her photographs.
French philosopher Henri Bergson [1859-1941] introduced the term ‘la durée’, a continuous experience of time which is determined by a subjective consciousness. Jeanjean allows her work to emerge from this alternative experience of reality. She mixes changing experiences and perspectives with concrete objects and images from the traditions of the village of Aumont. For example, she depicts ‘grain dolls’ from the surrounding area – these ‘corn mothers’ are offerings of gratitude for the harvest – as metaphors in an amalgamation of the themes of downfall, resurrection, life and death. The diptych ‘Robe’ is a sculptural visualisation of her grandmother’s dress, and an ode to memory. For Jeanjean, everything takes on meaning in her created space of imagination where dreams, desires and fears intersect.
Rock-paper-roots offers an artistic reflection on themes such as origin, myth, memory, play and the cultural transmission from generation to generation. The exhibition has been specially developed for the space of Bradwolff Projects. Where the emphasis is not on giving an overview of her work, but on the emergence of the personal experience of the work.
Géraldine Jeanjean (Amsterdam, 1978) lives and works in Amsterdam. She graduated with honors from the Fotoacademie Amsterdam. In 2008 she made the artist book Aumont. Her work has been exhibited at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam among others, and has been acquired for the collection of the Kunstmuseum in The Hague. She is nominated for the Somfy Photography Award 2020 (SPA). At the beginning of October 2020, new work will be exhibited, and the winners will be announced. In the context of her work and exhibition at Bradwolff Projects, a new book will be launched later this year.