Short Answer Sunday: Rachel de Joode

Meant to elicit quick, intuitive responses, Short Answer Sunday will introduce readers to a wide variety of artists, educators, writers, curators, arts professionals, art enthusiasts and art adjacent individuals whose inclinations I admire. With the intent of getting to know the person behind the artwork as well generating new avenues to artistic discovery, participants may respond with only a few words or an artist’s name, always with the opportunity to elaborate if they wish!

I have been a Rachel de Joode fan for nearly a decade now (the 2017 Myths of the Marble show at the ICA in Philly was my hook). If you are not yet familiar with Rachel de Joode’s work, I implore you to stop reading immediately and visit her website right away. Her work is featured in survey texts like Phaidon’s Vitamin C (Clay & Ceramic in Contemporary Art) and Photography is Magic. If you are a fellow de Joode-head, then please pat yourself on the back and do a congratulatory little dance. You know what I know, Rachel de Joode’s work is a force.

There are certain songs that I can’t listen to without dancing. It doesn’t matter where I am, what I am doing or who I am with, I will absolutely start to dance if you play these songs around me (thankfully only one or two other people know the power of this music over me—it is a powerful tool and should be used only for good). I bring this up because Rachel’s work is also like this for me. When I see it, I want to move. Maybe I digress, but sometimes I think that the response to contemporary art should not be to write intelligibly or to think rationally about it, but to follow it where it leads us. To let it move us.

Perhaps it is my god-shaped-hole talking, but I do look for spiritual experiences in works of art. Not every art object has it—but Rachel’s work does. I expect that it lives within the tension of the materials themselves, in the strange oppositions and mergers of color, shape, and form. These supply the messages that speak to me the most. Her nuanced use of color, light and shadow is unexpected, as is the surprising, subversive quality of her materials (clay as image and photography as object? yes, please). There is also often really fun slippage between the screen-based and the physical worlds (are they even separate places?? As time progresses, it feels harder to distinguish). Her sculptures are made by the body and speak of the body (the sloppy, fragile, disgusting gorgeousness of it all). While clay and paint are often used as metaphors for the body and it’s output, there’s something that strikes me as new and different here—an awareness of our physical forms as perceptual systems that have both allowances and terms (that can be manipulated). But whatever it is, it’s bigger than what I have the capacity to sum up, and that is something that I look for in a work of art.

Sending a giant thank you to Rachel de Joode for participating in this project! I know you will enjoy her Short Answer Sunday.

xo, Lauren

Name: Rachel de Joode
Occupation: Artist
Astrological data: Sun in Cancer, Moon in Taurus, Rising Sign (Ascendant): likely Virgo (late Leo into Virgo)
Hometown: Amersfoort, NL
Current location: Berlin, DE

An artwork that makes you laugh?

 

Can't say which but Sarah Lucas comes to mind. Or Mika Rottenberg.

 

An artwork that makes you cry?

 

The Kiss by Rodin

 

Image Source

Most underrated artist?

 

Jacoba van Heemskerck, Camille Claudel, Claude Cahun, Hannah Wilke, Hannah Höch

 

An artwork that you'd like to live inside for a week?

 

Inside a movie of Mika Rottenberg

 

An artist whose work you can't stop thinking about?

 

Duchamp

 

An artwork that feels like a warm hug?

 

Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother

 

What's your favorite characteristic in an artwork?

 

Surprise and layers of meaning

 

Erotic artwork? (editor's note: this is a multiple choice question)

 

Other: sometimes

 

What's an artwork that doesn't look like art?

Nature

  

What's an artwork that you suspect that you shouldn't like, but you do (guilty pleasure)?

 

There's nothing one shouldn't like there are no rules about liking

 

What's an artwork that you secretly hate?

Too many to answer here

 

Fav monograph or art book?

I look a lot at Laura Owens' monograph

 

Fav museum or gallery in your current city?

Neue Nationalgalerie (the building)

 

Source: A.Savin, Wikipedia

Last exhibition you saw irl?

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst at KW

 

What art material do you love to nerd out on?

Basically all art materials!

 

What's a book that changed your life?

Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Bennett

❤

Rachel de Joode (b. 1979, Amersfoort, NL) is a Dutch-born, Berlin-based artist working across photography, sculpture, and installation. Her work explores the relationship between images and objects in the digital era, treating photography not as representation but as material. Printed images are cut, folded, layered, and assembled into spatial structures in which surface, edge, and support become central elements. De Joode’s work investigates how images behave once they enter physical space. Photographs are materialized into sculptural forms and often re-photographed, creating a feedback loop between image and object. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Oslo), ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Museum Prinsenhof Delft, and Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen. She is represented by Galerie Christophe Gaillard (Paris) and Annka Kultys Gallery (London). Alongside her studio practice, de Joode is active as an educator. She teaches in the MA Photography program at the École cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ECAL), where she leads the course Materialized Photography.

For more information about Rachel de Joode, take a look at her website and follow her on Instagram!