UN/REAL hits Arbutus Greenway billboards for Capture Photography Festival, to June 11
Dutch artist Viviane Sassen’s work purposefully confuses our perception of space
Viviane Sassen, Untitled 017, from Roxane II series, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson
Capture Photography Festival presents UN/REAL at Billboards: Arbutus Greenway, between Burrard and Fir Streets (1654 West 6th Avenue) to June 11
PUBLIC ART PROJECTS are an important focus of Capture Photography Festival, and new for 2023 is UN/REAL, which launched March 24.
The billboard exhibition features the work of Viviane Sassen, a Dutch artist who obscures the boundaries between fashion and art photography in works spanning still life, portraits, and landscapes. The through line is the way light itself becomes a primary subject that’s used to “create surreal shadows, convey mood, and evoke the fantastical”, according to Capture, which explains: “In her work, the familiar becomes less so, as recognizable but unexpected forms collide and blur the line between representation and abstraction. The viewer is confronted with the real – the people and scenes Sassen captures with her lens – presented in a deliberately surreal manner, creating a sort of cognitive dissonance. A black void floats in a desert landscape, a woman’s silhouette hovers above paperwork forming a strange visual collage, forming a mythological hybrid; a myriad of strawberries forms a decorative pattern verging on the abstract. Her experiments with that which we think we know purposefully confuse our perception of space, ask the viewer to consider alternate realities, and push audiences to contemplate the undetermined symbolic possibilities presented in her images. In doing so, Sassen expands our understanding of photography as a medium that offers a faithful relationship to the world around us.”
Based in Amsterdam, Sassen studied fashion design and later photography at the Utrecht School of the Arts and Ateliers Arnhem respectively. A retrospective of 17 years of her fashion work, In and Out of Fashion, opened at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam, in 2012, before travelling to the Rencontres d’Arles festival, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, and Fotomuseum Winterthur.
Among the honours Sassen has earned for her work are the International Center of Photography in New York’s Infinity Award for Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography (2011) and the David Octavius Hill Medal from the German Photography Academy (2015).
Lucas Blalock, Conch and Berries and, 2015-17. Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber (New York/Zurich/Vienna) and Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels).
UN/REAL is part of the fest’s Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project, which also includes Brooklyn-based photographer Lucas Blalock’s French Country Kitchen, curated by Capture’s executive director, Emmy Lee Wall, and now showing to July 17 at Billboard: Fraser Street at 15th Avenue (across from Grey Church). “His work appears deceptively cute and comical,” Capture notes; “upon second glance, his images are surreal openings into worlds and feelings at once familiar and strange.”
Capture has many other outdoor exhibitions; see here for more information.
