Room To Play

Simen Johan creates surreal and narrative tableaux of corrupted youth. His images of children and adolescents are constructed by digitally manipulating and combining parts of faces and bodies belonging to people of various ethnicities, ages, and genders. His fictional identities are depicted in equally fabricated scenarios that are replete with references to both the art historical tradition and Freudian sexuality. The poster-perfect finish of his prints belies the disturbing nature of their content; a pubescent girl hula hoops against an idyllic seaside backdrop, as the hoop leaves bruises on her waist; an androgynous teenager cradles the head of a dead sheep on which flies are beginning to land.

My photographs are composites of multiple-image fragments that I digitally manipulate and combine, including both images that I have photographed myself and found images. By combining different elements, my objective is to create artificial scenarios that appear vaguely familiar and produce numerous associations. I want to evoke a sense of familiarity that will seduce the viewer into allowing his or her own experience, imagination, and understanding of existing popular imagery to become tools for interpreting my work. Simen Johan The power and pathos of Johan's images springs from his intuitions about the texture of childhood experience and from his method. He works in collage, the technique at the heart of Surrealism. Collage frees him to walk the world with his camera and receive its impossible permissions. Something ordinary will strike him -- a driveway, an abandoned house by the side of the road, a woman's cheek - and he will shoot it, or sample it digitally if it comes from another source, and file it in his electronic unconscious (the computer). Children, dolls, and the peculiar constructions at the heart of his photographs (Dolls stuffed with meat and bird corpses, among others) Johan usually photographs in his studio. How he assembles these elements into digital tableaus is the mystery, and the process of adding, subtracting and recombining can be lengthy. "I don't finish quickly." he has remarked. Discards are strewn along his digital highway. Lyle Rexer