A Peanut, Half a Horse,
a Chicken Foot,
a Burning Cigarette
and a Black Hole, 2011
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For Giant Bowl I designed the giant inflatable still life:
A Peanut, Half a Horse, a Chicken Foot, a Burning Cigarette and a Black Hole. The work is app. 4.5 meter high and app. 5 meter in width. The inflatable still life consists out of a round disk with marble motif.
Directly placed on this pedestal are 5 inflatable objects: a hyperrealistic peanut (in a shell), a hyperrealistic burning cigarette, a hyperrealistic chickenfoot, half a horse and a thin black disk. This piece can be thematisized as ‘magic surreal—inflatable neo-dada’.
The elements displayed have individually symbolic meanings: the peanut metaphors evolution, primates and a mental condition, half a wild horse is a metaphor for amputation, restrainment and magic shows (box sawing trick). The burning cigarette is a metaphor for fire (the element), smoke (blurred vision) and the dawning of the end, the chicken foot is a voodoo charm which is symbolically used for the “scratching” of the vision of the future. The black disk is representing a black hole which is a symbol for the mighty unknown. Together these ingredients form an inflatable perspective of the future human condition, revealing the dawning of the end of the post modern world.
Altars, 2009
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A project of built altars in urban spaces. These altars function in the praise and worship of elements of life as we know it.
A series of built altars in urban spaces. These altars appear to be discrete entities, placed in a number of urban locations, including public spaces, strips of urban nature, facades of domestic building and parking lots. They serve to praise, bless and connect us to 7 important components of contemporary human culture: food, energy, transmission, light, the physical body, nature and home.
About Altars, written by Claudia Seidel
Culture is determined by rites, and altars have always adorned holy places where people worshipp the gods they believe in. The adoration of a higher being often went hand-in-hand with making a sacrifice of some sort depending on the belief system and the symbolic system being enacted. The 20th century, witnessed a decay not only of traditional rites and symbols of religion but also of those concerning how to lead a thoughtful and fulfilling everyday life. Obviously a deeper understanding of life is vanishing somewhat.
The question of what makes sense in life is currently dictated by lifestyle arrangements accompanied by popular books and brochures to compensate the feeling of an inner void. The Altar series introduces a new symbolic system relating to the arrangement of the everyday objects that surround us. According to the service/mission/function of every Altar piece, a special selection of items is arranged and applied at spec
Claudia Seidel, Fashion critic, Art Historian, Editor in Chief VORN Magazine
Selection from the ungoing
series of sculptural collages
and still lifes, 2005 - ongoing
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Emilie Florenkowsky—Editor Meta Magazine wrote:
Whereas people were, at one time, the focal point of Rachel de Joode’s photography, acting as mannequins of sort to display an array of objects that help to define human activity and behavior, it seems that the people are now exiting center stage. The objects are beginning to speak for themselves, and in some cases, to take over the human subjects, aggressively describing what we do, how we look and how we act. In many images, the objects are chosen and grouped together in such ways that they could even be our stand-ins.
The artist follows the tradition of questioning, ‘what is an object’? Her documentation of the objects that accompany us throughout our daily lives also begins to question and seeks to unravel ‘what is a person’? At one point in viewing one may wonder what / who is actually doing the accompanying? Without even looking further than my writing desk, I can clearly see who / what is the majority in the room, in my home, and all around us.
This contemplation affords a certain power to our objects. Many objects present in the artist’s still lifes and mise-en-scenes have outlived their functions. And, they will outlive us, serving one day as tools for the anthropologists of the future. With this in mind, there is an everpresent element of the eternal in de Joode’s photography. Her work itself functions anthropologically, looking back, culling objects from both space and time to describe what we were, what we are and what we will always be.
Size Matters, 2007
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Skin colored objects measured on the face of a man
About Size Matters , written by Claudia Seidel:
We were very happy to use Size Matters as the cover for issue 5 of VORN Magazine published in 2008. In total contrast to common cover conceptions, we conceived of a proposition that would not function as the typical attractor (that is, normally a half naked woman), but would be a surprising or even irritating encounter for our readers to get immediately in touch with our intentions why we do VORN Magazine.
Size Matters shows a photograph of a human being seen from the front, the face of an elderly man covered by assorted bits and pieces. The application of these patchwork items transforms a classical photographic portrait into a three-dimensional collage. In this way Size Matters references at least two artistic phenomena. First, it reminds us of Cubism and the Dada movement, which both paid tribute to a mulifaceted approach towards life and its depictions.
Nonsense was an important word then and still is if you like to create self-reflective and aesthetic statements about the world. There is always this magical and mysterious feeling of irrationality as soon as it comes to emotions, passion and the soul, and this too is what art is about. Thus we also accompanied Size Matters with a quotation from Roul Haussmann’s “Synthetic Cinema Of Painting”, written in April 1918. Second, we were convinced that what was true for Raoul Haussman still applies to the human condition today: the real state of mind is nothing else but miraculous constellations in real materials… that correspond organically to their own brittle or bulging fragility… Size Matters is a visual paraphrase that understands life as an ongoing process like a chain of infinite possibilities.
Claudia Seidel, Fashion critic, Art Historian, Editor in Chief VORN Magazine
The Small Blue Gradient, 2011
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I used a small aqua blue gradient as a thread throughout a series of sculptural compositions of ambiguous artifacts.
The blue gradient, one of the most used backgrounds in contemporary studio photography and in contemporary aesthetics. One of the most important signifiers of our age. What is it this artifact?
The Residue of
those Celestial Objects bound
to our Sun by Gravity, 2009
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Using displacement and reclassification of scientific, cultural, historical and contemporary planetary interpretation, my goal, through visualization, is to purify the human conception of the fellow planets orbiting around our Sun.
About The Residue of those Celestial Objects bound to our Sun by Gravity written by Hili Perlson:
In November 2009, noted historian and semiotician Umberto Eco curated a show at the Louvre entitled “The Infinity of Lists.” From the ‘list of lists’, Homer’s Iliad, to Andy Warhol’s compulsive collecting, the creation of lists - categorizing, cataloguing and collecting - is as old as time. For Eco, the list reflects man’s attempt to rationalize the world, yet behind each list is the sense of ineffability. The fascination with listed objects is thus imbued with a double meaning: they help us understand the world, yet they remind us at the same time that the world cannot be expressed in certain ways.
In her series “The Residue of Those Celestial Objects Bound to Our Sun by Gravity,” Rachel de Joode creates a list in the Eco sense of the word. Her depictions of the Solar system are a collection of cultural and historical references, sagas and metaphors mixed with scientific facts that may or may not explain much about the world, but help us to rationalize it. They are the visual interpretations of the lists that de Joode has comprised for each planet. The visual interpretation stems, in turn, from her own private visual vocabulary, and so, the list in Rachel de Joode’s art is both a universal and a personal rationalization, and an invitation to contemplate one’s own semiotics.
Hili Perlson, Freelance art and fashion critic, Editor-at-large Sleek Magazine Co-Founder Meta Magazine.
TABVLA, 2011
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TABVLA is a photoseries of small sculptural collages coinciding with a guideline pointing out the diverse symbolic properties of each artefact used in the 6 installations.
This work is about the instant information access in the present world. Facts get to be objects. Facts get to be value. This work also refers to the idea universal knowledge in renaissance times.
