Artists Welmer Keesmaat and Johan Nieuwenhuize will show their photographic work from 8 June till 6 July in our gallery.
The imagery of Welmer Keesmaat is based on experiences and processes which can differ any moment. Today his focus is on the theme’s: specific location and contact. The subjects are: personal interaction, origin and history, occupying space, relation, close – openess. In his work these subjects are investigated, beginning with an intuitive phase in which the image is made, followed by a proces in which the images come together in a book or an exhibition. Apart from being a photographer, Welmer Keesmaat is also a graphic designer and maker of the magazine Yvi.
Johan Nieuwenhuize will show his photoproject IMG.
IMG is a growing collection of abstract and semi-abstract photographic observations of “the city”. The work is an active visual archive consisting of images made during Johan Nieuwenhuizeʼs travels to different cities in Europe and the USA.
Subject to the images are structures, buildings, cars or reflections. Often the pictures are details or abstract interpretations. The way these images are selected, is similar to the way memories develop. Alike to memories, these images are not trustworthy and do not reflect specific events or places, but merely have reality as a starting point. The whole becomes an abstract representation of a place, “the city” as a concept.
The way combinations of images are being made, is based on the Kuleshov experiment from 1918. In this film experiment, a filmed portrait of a man is combined in three edits; in combination with a shot of a woman on a sofa, a shot of a dead baby and with a shot of a bowl of soup. The expression of the man remains the same, but the viewer interprets it in different ways, depending on the edit.
Within presentations of IMG this psychological phenomenon is being applied by Nieuwenhuize in order to shift the meaning of individual images, to alter the context and to let the viewer associate freely and form a new significance. From the growing photographic database, the various edits of images are being made. The works are being presented linearly on the wall and appear in different combinations. To some extent, the presentation is similar to a phrase from a book or poem, hereby following itʼs own visual hyphenation, grammar and style.