Geraldine Jeanjean’s layered images are situated in and around the French village of Aumont (Massif Central), where her grandmother grew up and where she herself regularly stays at the family home. This area plays a central role in the poetic installation that Jeanjean is showing at Bradwolff Projects.

While her grandmother’s memories of Aumont faded due to dementia, her children are discovering that same world. With this, Aumont transformed for Jeanjean into a mythical place, where present and past merged into a single moment. This twilight zone between time and culture caused desires and memories to fuse into a reality all its own, which Jeanjean tried to capture in her photographs.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson [1859-1941] introduced the concept of ‘la durée,’ a continuous experience of time determined by subjective consciousness. Jeanjean allows her work to emerge from this alternative experience of reality. She blends changing experiences and perspectives with concrete objects and images from the traditions of the village of Aumont. For instance, she displays ‘grain dolls’ from the surrounding area—these ‘corn mothers’ form thank-offerings for the harvest—as metaphors in a fusion of the themes of downfall, rebellion, life, and death. The diptych ‘Robe,’ in which she sculpturally visualized her grandmother’s dress, is also an ode to memory. For Jeanjean, everything acquires meaning in the imaginative space she has created, where dreams, desires, and fears intersect.

Rock-paper-roots offers an artistic reflection on themes such as origin, myth, memory, play, and cultural transmission from generation to generation. The exhibition was developed specifically for the Bradwolff Projects space, where the emphasis lies not on providing 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 cum laude from the Fotoacademie Amsterdam. In 2008, she created the artist’s book Aumont. Her work has been exhibited at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, among others, and is included in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. She has been nominated for the Somfy Photography Award 2020 (SPA). New work will be exhibited and the winners announced in early October 2020. In the context of her work and exhibition at Bradwolff Projects, a new book will be launched later this year featuring an essay by Taco Hidde Bakker.