Hana Sackler
Artist Feature
Every week an artist is featured whose single image was published by Der Greif. The Feature shows the image in the original context of the series.
Jessy Boon Cowler - Postcards from Pachamama
Feb 12, 2020
Postcards from Pachamama is a celebration of sensuality as well as a critique of exoticisation and humanity’s dislocation from nature, paper-collaging digital photographs of nudes into my 35mm images of Latin America.
I am interested in the relationship between the physical versus the intellectual, specifically the common exclusion of one from the other within British culture, which leads to frustration and a need to escape. The desire those of us from cold countries hold for the Tropics, the fantasy of an island retreat; the exoticisation of a foreign land where we can let go of our inhibitions, the shame felt due to an inherited history of colonisation.
I’m also interested in the relationship between the natural versus the artificial; humans are so detached from the natural world that we have come to see ourselves as something greater than nature and we are suffering the consequences. Since the growth of our consciousness we have driven an anthropogenic reorganisation of the nature around us. The need for humans to re-entangle with mother nature is getting more urgent by the day, as demonstrated by the Latin American philosophy of Buen Vivir.
Worse even than our detachment from nature is our detachment from and prejudice towards one another, and my work is a campaign to see ourselves as a part of a unified greater whole, environmentally and socially. I embrace both contemporary and traditional technologies as a means to demonstrate that apparent opposite ends of a spectrum can coexist and complement each other and that differences should be celebrated.
Artist Blog
The blog of Der Greif is written entirely by the artists who have been invited to doing an Artist-Feature. Every week, we have a different author.
Published in:
»Guest-Room Tristan Lund«
Postcards from Pachamama
Feb 18, 2020 - Jessy Boon Cowler
Here’s an install shot of my featured series, Postcards from Pachamama from my Masters show last year. Peace out.
Pink on the Inside
Feb 17, 2020 - Jessy Boon Cowler
As a comment on how absurd it is to judge someone on the colour of their skin, Pink on the Inside digitally collages my photographs of the forms and textures of both human and fruit skin. Humans are like fruits, falling away from their trees and spreading their seeds around. We get juicy and attractive for those we want to attract, then we wrinkle and decompose. We are part of the microcosm and macrocosm, and if we share 60% of our DNA with a banana, why do some people struggle to see the common ground with another human being? I construct surreal compositions out of fruit in which to frame the body and allow photoshop to take over the areas in between, blurring the two types of skin into a new form.
Multi Love
Feb 16, 2020 - Jessy Boon Cowler
Multi Love is a series of nine diptychs, reappropriating images from beauty magazines which are rearranged to create different perspectives. This project was made using the energy created by the end of a relationship. Destructive energy can be channelled into a creative process and art is a form of self-therapy, personal exploration and self-expression. The practice is process-led, an excavation of the subconscious, where meanings often surface in retrospect. There are at least two sides to every story.
Ode to Gold
Feb 15, 2020 - Jessy Boon Cowler
Inspired by the sensual and empowered way in which Klimt painted women over a hundred years ago, I like to shoot my subjects in a similar way regardless of gender or anything else. His use of embellishment often mimicking natural forms is echoed in my digital expansions of flesh – mimicking the textures of human skin, sometimes more convincingly than others. His use of gold invokes religious iconography, celebrating the sensualised human form. My drips of gold are a comment on humanity’s wasteful use of natural commodity and scarcity, a critique of the opulence and over-indulgence of the super-rich.
Plagiarism
Feb 14, 2020 - Jessy Boon Cowler
I’ve recently been working on a series I’m calling ‘Plagiarism’ as I am reappropriating images from monographs of some of my favourite painters.
I sift through the pages, taking what attracts me and leaving what doesn’t. I then cut out shapes that are influenced by the work, allowing my intuition lead. Finally, I restructure the pieces into my own compositions, resulting in a familiar but distinctly new narrative.
Reverse Culture Shock
Feb 13, 2020 - Jessy Boon Cowler
As I take over the Artist Blog this week I will be doing a summary of my work, past and present.
To begin with, we look back at my series Reverse Culture Shock, which I created from 2011-2015, after I got home from a few months in Central America, my first trip outside of Europe. It really changed the way I looked at the world around me.
Reverse Culture Shock is the experience of readjusting to your home culture, when the previously familiar has become unfamiliar. It’s a surreal experience, which led to the production of a body of work that visually represents this feeling, using snapshots taken at home and abroad. By placing non-edited images amongst digitally manipulated ones, the viewer is left in a similar state of uncertainty.
