source: sickoftheradio

Now that the formalities (and the awkwardness of first meetings) are out of the way, perhaps its time that I let the two of you get better acquainted. Before I do, though, I must tell you that Surrealism is a great date, but, as you’ll find, she might not be the best for relationships, as she is quick to display her emotional baggage stemming from past heartbreaks (her last serious relationship ended when she caught her boyfriend sleeping with her best friend, a blonde who seduced men with her “abstractness”). So, if you are thinking about getting to know her over a glass of wine, you might want to just order the bottle. You’re going to need it.

What you are looking at are incongruous images (But, I probably didn’t need to tell you that). They are reality (Venus: the planet, the statue, the Goddess), coupled with unconscious, dream-like representations. These representations take the shape of trash, or liter (the remnants of life, also known as the residue). They are a melting pot, in which the lines separating the two physical states of man (awake/asleep, alive/dead, lightness/darkness) have been immutably blurred. What you are left with is a gray area. For Rachel de Joode, this gray area not only cumulates in her canvas (or simply, the background of her work), but it also shapes her reality. She notes that her collection, “The residue of those celestial objects bound to our Sun by gravity,” (TROTCOBTOSBG for short) is to aide her in grasping “the phenomena of my life in time and space.” In short, de Joode’s work is her attempt to understand life’s more complex ideas in a neutral setting.

It is no coincidence that her works share motifs with Roman Gods and Goddesses, who the Romans named the planets after (note: not all of the planets were named by the Romans, but the tradition of naming planets after relics of ancient Rome and Greece is still very much in practice). For the Romans, the planets played an integral part in their every day lives. In fact, the seven-day cycle is a result of the Roman belief that the planets, which took daily shifts monitoring the earth, played a direct role in human fortune (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon). To reach a planet like Mars would have been, for the Romans, incomprehensible. It would have been a journey only accomplished through death. Yet, for us, reaching Mars is commonplace. Dozens of space vehicles have been successfully placed in Mars’s orbit and on Mars’s surface, and dozens of space vehicles are left as litter, as residue of human contact with the Red Planet. For de Joode, the question is: how can we defile what the Romans and Greeks and others held as sacred? The answer is the expansion of globalization, which she refers to as “solarization.” The answer is the power of progress trumping the power of the divine.

As Henry Adams discusses in “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” after seeing the world’s first combustible engine, the progress of science was “a revelation of mysterious energy like that of the Cross; [it was] what, in terms of mediæval science, were called immediate modes of the divine substance.” Adams is verbalizing what de Joode’s art illustrates. That is, we have conquered the earth and are conquering space. These feats move us closer to knowledge of where we are, but further from understanding who we are.
For a second date with Surrealism, meet her at www.racheldejoode.com. You bring the wine; she’ll bring the substance.
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source: coolhunting

Rachel de Joode is a Berlin-based sculptor who specializes in still lifes made from materials like a stack of Kraft singles, an oozing banana, a wooden club piercing a pile of white bread, wigs, people and a giant inflatable chicken foot. Her most recent work “Life is Very Long” is a part sculpture, part performance piece composed of tennis gravel, styrofoam and 60 frozen Dr. Oetker pizzas. She draws inspiration from history, philosophy, space travel and obscure scientific facts, which may help to explain why she classified the sculpture “A Peanut, Half a Horse, a Chicken Foot, a Burning Cigarette and a Black Hole” as “magic-surreal inflatable neo-dada”. If that doesn’t clear things up, perhaps this explanation will shed some light:

“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.”

She continues her exploration of art, science, culture and nature as the photo editor and art director of META Magazine, which “traces the uncommon threads between common topics, presenting its readers with views into the abyss of visual information and with experiments in associative reading,” de Joode explains. “We have contributors such as Olaf Breuning, Tao Lin, Cai Guo-Qiang, Pieter Hugo, Jan Kempenaers and Alan Shapiro among other scientists, historians, artists, activists, occultists and theorists.”

She’s also the co-founder of De Joode & Kamutzki, a new auction house that aims to increase the accessibility of contemporary art. “We don’t see art as a luxury good that one might consider purchasing when they already have everything else that money can buy,” de Joode says. “Our mission is to inspire you to invest in great artwork not for the sake of its resale value, the status symbol attached to it or as a way to spend surplus money. We want people to buy art out of love, fascination and admiration. Because art is essential.”

Her work will be featured in two exhibitions in April: “tropico post – apocalyptic” at extra extra in Philadelphia and “Bad Girls of 2012” at Interstate Projects in NYC. Meanwhile, she’s working on a short film with dancers Jared Gradinger and Angela Schubot before she leaves for a two-month residency at Sculpture Space in Utica, all while Panama-based gallery Diablo Rosso prints an edition of her work for Zona Maco, the contemporary art fair in Mexcio City. I was lucky to catch up with her this week for a quick chat.

You studied time-based arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. What does that mean? What are time-based arts?
It means art which is somehow related or dependent on time—like film, web-based art or performance. Nevertheless, this department is a kind of free art meets conceptual art department. You could basically use every type of media you wanted, the focus was more on your idea, on your concept.

How do you select the materials for your sculptures? Is it an intuitive process or is there a lot of trial and error?
I choose objects which I find iconographic for the current human condition, objects which relate to the everyday, like pizzas, or computers, or coffee mugs, or remote controls. These objects are just “there” somehow. I am not constantly on the lookout. It’s more about opening your eyes. Like when I think of using a telephone in one of my works, all of a sudden I notice all these great telephones everywhere. In the end it’s either/or. Sometimes I have an image in my head and then I need to find a certain object. Sometimes the object comes to me and I get inspired to do something with it.

When I start to assemble an installation or still life I think a lot about the texture and the colors. Colors really work on the emotions and so you can do a lot with this. Mostly I color-code the objects or arrange them tone-on-tone. Setting up a still-life is like making a sculptural collage. It’s cutting and pasting, somehow it’s the same as photoshopping.

I have a table with objects (ingredients) lined up and then I just try to put them together until it works. I never use all the objects that I picked out in front. Then the hardest part is having things sit and stand together. Things always fall over. I scream and condemn the objects. Gravity is my worst enemy when I make an installation!

For “A Peanut, Half a Horse, a Chicken Foot, a Burning Cigarette and a Black Hole,” how did you fabricate the inflatables? Why use inflatable objects as opposed to another sculptural form?
In 2010, I was invited by the Oslo-based artists Sverre Strandberg and Anna Daniell to make an inflatable piece. They organized and curated the show “Giant Ball”, an exhibition of inflatable art pieces held in Oslo’s football stadium.

It was very natural to design this still-life. The piece was produced in Korea. The concept, design and the high-res images I delivered for the print on the inflatable material are mine. The curation and production are Sverre Strandberg and Anna Daniell.

The cool thing about it is that I could make something like “Half a Horse” which would be very hard to make in reality! The sculpture definitely turned out great and it is so small to carry around, which is a big bonus! I just need to built the structure which it stands on.

You’ve said work addresses “the nature of humanity and questions who we are and why we’re here.” Has your work led you closer to answering these questions? What have you discovered about our humanity through your work?
Actually, I think I will never find out. It’s so ridiculous! It is really so ridiculous that we are alive. It confuses me a lot. I guess we need to simply do some funny and nice things, things we want to do and do them right enough to also be able to enjoy them. People are very strange, what they do, how they live, what they want from life. The only realization I made is that we are all very similar. All humans want things, they desire things.
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source: famousauctionhouse

Multimedia artist Rachel de Joode has always had a keen interest in the process of deconstruction of day-to day items. Turning them into abstract objects that rise beyond their original meaning and utility. She uses her deconstruction and abstraction to demystify every-day life and to explore social and cultural structures. Investigating in particular the relationship between the objects and the humans that use them. Her work is often humorous and confronting. One of her latest works was Life is Very Long a sculptural installation and live-performance for the Bergen Kunsthall made out of frozen pizza’s that slowly defrosted as the performance went on.
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source: biboloid

Rachel de Joode es una artista holandesa cuyo “trabajo gira en torno a la matriz de la vida cotidiana.” Crea “instalaciones, esculturas, fotografías y performances”. Rachel indaga en la capacidad del objeto de transferir y medir nuestra “humanidad”. “¿Por qué estamos aquí? ” y ” ¿Qué significa ser un ser humano hoy en día? ” Intenta comprender estas preguntas “mediante la investigación de la semiótica contemporánea de los artefactos domésticos , los flujos de información , la religión , la naturaleza humana o a si misma.”
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source: alondramh

Rachel de Joode- artista contemporaneo Berlin

El cigarro es una metafora del fuego, el humo una vision confusa como el final proximo, la pata de pollo representa una vision del futuro, en compañia con el hoyo negro como lo desconocido.
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source: helter-skelterpl

Rachel de Joode

Malarka holenderska Rachel de Joode rozpoczynała swoją twórczość od instalacji i rzeźb, później zajęła się performance i fotografią. Jej proste i niezbyt delikatne prace dotyczą nowoczesnych europejskich eksperymentów z przyrodą nieożywioną: pejzażem, martwą naturą, architekturą, symbolami klasy średniej i atrybutami codzienności. Sztuczne ucho może się pojawić obok bochenka chleba krojonego, a kokos, kamień oraz kolumna z plastiku – zawinięte w papier niebieskiego koloru.
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source: shnyazhka

Рейчел де Джуд берлинский скульптор, которая специализируется на натюрмортах из таких материалов, как банан, кучи белого хлеба, парики, люди и гигантские надувные куриные ноги.

Рейчел черпает вдохновение из истории, философии, космических путешествий и неясных научных фактов.