Jasper de Beijer has a surprising relationship to photography. For him, it is the final form of a long and complex process involving documentary research, sculpture and drawing. The result defies perception. Confronted with large, surrealist scenes, the eye is uncertain whether it is looking at a model, an ancient engraving or the playground of a child with an unbridled imagination.
His latest series is inspired by the story of Christopher Knight, an 18-year old who withdrew to the woods of North Pond, Chicago, a portable radio his only link to the outside world. He was gone for 27 years. Jasper de Beijer imagines how solitude influenced the young hermite and his perception of historical events that changed the outside world during his absence.
Knight’s story could be an allegory for Beijer himself, working isolated in his studio, taking pains over every detail of his photographs. Each element is a patiently modeled sculpture which he covers with paper and cross-hatches as he did years earlier as a draughtsman.
In fact, his pictures follow the same narrative flow as a drawing, with its uncertain time setting and the way it stimulates the imagination. A photographs shows a group of eight men standing on the edge of a boat floating on a dark sea. Clouds, curly as Hokusai’s, block out the night sky, pierced by a man’s flashlight. They’re dressed in white and wearing diving boots. You would think they were going to investigate a case of Ebola. Are they off the coast of Lampedusa, analyzing a drowned corpse? Or is it the night that the Russian boat Bulgaria sunk into the Volga? Jasper de Beijer refuses to say. He simply gives the date for the title: July 10th, 2011.
EXHIBITION
Mr. Knight’s World Band Receiver
Jasper de Beijer
Thourgh February 28th 2015
The Empire Project
Siraselviler Cad. No:10 Kat:1
Beyoglu, Istanbul
Turkey
