Mometum is proud to exhbit the work of Ole Marius Joergensen, Alma Haser and Holly Lynton at AIPAD2023
Ole Marius Jørgensen - All that was left was a yellow duck
The Photography Show (AIPAD) - March 31 – April 2, 2023
Brightly colored plastic inflatables punctuate the otherwise serene vistas in Ole Jørgensen’s wryly titled All that was left was a yellow duck. The Norwegian photographer’s playful series pays homage to the 19th-century Düsseldorf school painter Hans Gude (1825–1903), updated for modern times.
Jørgensen makes skilled use of the romantic landscape idiom, transforming his native rural surroundings into striking painterly compositions filled with subtle atmospheric effects. Likewise, the recurrence of solitary figures–hikers and swimmers absorbed in their activities or gazing off into the sublime distance–reveals a keen depth of understanding of the visual tradition that the series engages. Against these pristine natural expanses, small details such as a beach towel or an orange Gore-Tex jacket serve to pull the scenes forward in the present day.
The partially deflated yellow duck from which the series draws its title, along with several other animal inspired pool floats, inject a mix of humor and melancholic surrealism, as if the people in Jørgensen’s scenes are vacationers at the end of the world. In these items, we see nature supplanted and transformed into artificial and disposable commodities. While these props may be viewed as a critique on our contemporary culture, by working within the landscape genre, Jørgensen cleverly points to a potential culprit in the visual tradition that bears as much responsibility as any for turning nature into an image.
Jørgensen (b. 1976) lives in Asker, a rural town near Oslo, Norway. He studied film at Solent University, Southampton and graduated from Norwegian Fotofagskole in Trondheim. Since 2006, he has had solo exhibitions in Norway, Europe, Asia and the United States, and his work can be found in public and private collections in Oslo, Stockholm, London, Madrid, Berlin, Hong Kong, and the US.
Holly Lynton - Bare Handed
The Photography Show (AIPAD) - March 31 – April 2, 2023
Momentum is pleased to present selections from Holly Lynton’s Bare Handed, a nuanced portrait of rural life in 21st-century America. The meditative portraits and landscapes, which also appear in a new monograph published this year under L'Artiere Edizioni, depict people who work directly with the land and its resources, highlighting traditional practices that have largely been replaced by modern mechanization.
To create this remarkable and varied body of work, Lynton has returned to photograph many of her subjects–including the likes of Massachusetts shade tobacco farmers, South Carolina shrimpers, Montana beaverslide haystackers, New Mexico beekeepers, and Oklahoma catfish noodlers–on an annual basis since 2007. The result is a rare portrayal of rural life that moves beyond mythology and stereotypes to reveal a dynamic cultural landscape steeped in tradition but unburdened by nostalgia.
With this series, Lynton takes on the complex legacy of American rural photography established by Dorothea Lange and the other WPA photographers in the 1930s, critically engaging with the pervasive religious tropes, such as the Madonna and Child imagery found in those images. Rather than presenting us with stories of hardship and passing folkways, however, Lynton recasts her collaborators as deeply committed to a particular way of being in the world. Many of the portraits explore an almost spiritual way of being that emerges from the practices of working directly with animals and the land to sustain oneself.
Lynton (b. 1972) practices sustainable living in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. She began studying photography as an undergraduate at Yale University, where she majored in psychology. She holds an MFA in Photography from Bard College. Her photographs of modern rural communities are held in many public and private collections and have been exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Alma Haser - Within 15 Minutes
The Photography Show (AIPAD) - March 31 – April 2, 2023
Named after the average time separating the birth of identical twins, Alma Haser’s Within 15 Minutes explores the intersection of biology and identity through photography. The artist starts by making individual portraits of identical twins, which she turns into 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles. She then merges the puzzle pieces, interweaving them until each contains half of the other in an alternating grid pattern. Since the sitters are not made to assume the exact same pose, slight misregistrations in the eyes, mouth, and torsos result in a pair of slightly diffuse, abstract portraits. The playful process results in creative composites that feel formally linked yet emanate a unique aura.
Conceptually, Haser’s twin puzzles recall other attempts to explore biological affinity through photography, reaching back to the composite portrait technique Francis Galton devised in the 1880s, through Nancy Burson’s computer-generated facial morphs dating to the start of this millennium, up through the current proliferation of generative AI technologies. Where each of those methods seek to represent visual affinities, however, Haser’s technique, despite starting from identical twins, ultimately trends in the opposite direction to emphasize difference and the specificity of the photographic image.
Haser (born Germany, 1989) is based in Southeastern England. With a background in fine art and photography, she is known for expanding the expressive potential of traditional portrait photography through inventive material and conceptual interventions. Using paper-folding techniques, collage and other unconventional media and formats, she creates intricately layered portraits that reveal new and hidden dimensions in her sitters. She has received numerous honors, including the Magenta Foundation’s Bright Spark Award, the PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris, and the PDN Photo Annual Award. Her work has been exhibited widely in the UK, Europe, North America, and Australia.
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