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Astrid Kruse Jensen Nocturnal Dreamscapes
by Max Houghton
These
eerie nocturnal surveillances from Danish photographer Astrid Kruse
Jensen’s most recent series of work play with the very idea of reality.
Who is the young woman looking upon an illuminated box in a shopping
mall at night with a somnambulist’s gaze? Why is she there? Who, or
even what, captured this moment?
There she is again, at a
bus-stop, hands folded protectively across her lap, and again, staring
up in awe at a lamp-post, like a neo-Romantic poet. People are mostly
absent in Jensen’s images, save for the occasional visitation from a
female character, a latter-day Red Riding Hood who haunts these
deceptively placid dreamscapes, where an invisible wolf is always
lurking. An abiding sense of menace pervades the jaw-dropping beauty of
each nocturne.
’I restage situations I imagine could have taken
place in certain locations. What is real? It’s impossible to separate
your own subjective reality from ‘reality’. You are always with your
own reality,’ says Jensen. And it is in this way that ‘reality’ becomes
a kind of doppelganger to reality, with only a set of spectral fright
marks to separate the two. We are in the realm of the Uncanny, never
quite at ease with this strange species of the familiar played out
before our eyes. Although only one series carries the title
Hypernatural, it is the thread that binds all her work, as she
constructs a world more real than the real.
Jensen speaks of the
representation of the real as ’photography’s burden’. While her
jumping-off point is always reality, Jensen uses photography as a tool
to create fictions. Her long exposures permit more than the naked eye
can see, creating layers suffused with meaning. The water, for example,
in the geothermically heated Icelandic swimming pools, appears denser
than that element should rightfully be. Its newfound opacity may be
hiding something, something that could appear at any moment, breaking
the spectral silence, breaking the spell.
From Imaginary
Realities to Indefinite Spaces, there is always the sense that Jensen
is somehow searching for the end; for what lies beyond. As though in
the grip of a death drive, Jensen forces the viewer to confront what
might be waiting through the thick trees, or inside the creepy cottage
at the forest’s edge. Just like an especially dark Grimm’s fairytale,
it is while we are transfixed by a story and captivated by the enduring
mysteries of nature that terror strikes. Through her instinctive use of
the darkness of night combined with her appropriation of artificial
light sources, Jensen manipulates her locations, making nature her very
own theatre, subjecting it to the vicissitudes of human emotion. Often,
where we would expect black-and-white nightscapes, we find an excess of
colour. Yet other images are so dark as to be virtually impenetrable,
objects half-appearing as the eye adjusts to the darkness.
Houses
and trees are constant motifs in Jensen’s work, representing the
constant clash between the artificially constructed and nature, or
wilderness. Jensen describes her native Denmark as being ’without
wilderness’, something she noticed more keenly than ever on her return
from Scotland, where she studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Since
then, she has recognised her own quest for a space that no longer
exists in her own country, and thus has created psychological spaces
for herself through her images, where, like solitude standing, she can
luxuriate in a silent world.
The final image chosen for this
portfolio is from her latest work entitled Construction of Memories. As
we contemplate the red swings hanging serenely from the too-perfect
tree, the first thought may be of a joyful May Day dance, a familiar
seasonal tradition. Yet the people have long since vanished. Instead we
see their fictional nooses. The haunting has begun again.
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