NYAB Event - Ruud van Empel "Wonder"

Ruud van Empel "Wonder"

57 STUX + HALLER Gallery

This event has ended.

Van Empel creates photo-collages by meticulously stitching together fragments taken from an archive of thousands of images the artist photographs himself. Upon viewing the pristinely rendered images, however, no obvious trace of van Empel's Photoshop technique is evident. The viewer is instead drawn into van Empel's subtly conflicting worlds which simultaneously appear impossibly illusory and undeniably hyper-real.

Portrayed as children alone, in pairs, or large groups, van Empel's subjects seem to be held captive in tantalizingly magical moments of sexualized innocence. Locating his subjects in various scenes of wilderness or minimal quotidian environments, they appear lost in a liminal state between youth and adulthood, psychologically invoking the kinds of "in-between" subjects captured in, for instance, Rineke Dijkstra's photographs of adolescents. Van Empel's Generation series contains three different photographic works, each a panoramic view of what would appear as an otherwise ordinary class photo of a group of a few dozen young students. Each photograph, however, presents the uneasy reality of a seemingly mono-cultural student body. In one, an entire class of presumably Jewish children (most of whom wear the traditional kippah) is portrayed; another is composed entirely of black children and a third consists almost entirely of white children.

Media

• Photography
• Prints

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