happy skulls - pastels- six inch heel -sexts

Works from exhibition, Volido New York, NY - September 2010

The Kiss, Group Exhibition: Hotel Alexander, Davos, Switzerland -December 2011 thru March 2012

Need 4 Speed ft. Grace Jones, Group exhibition: Karsten Greve, Paris, France -November 2011 thru January 2012

Selection of archival inks and soft pastels on matte paper, 20 x 16 inches, 2000 thru 20010

Pastels

PRESS RELEASE

James Hedges IV is pleased to present new work by the artist and filmmaker, Justine Harari. In the tradition of her previously exhibited work, this show of pastel works on paper continues to investigate notions of authorship, the meaning of images and ideas about reality.  The images, appropriated from classic films and iconic imagery she finds online as well as from her own photographic practice , are recast in soft, powder pastels, one of the most traditional artistic mediums, and are presented in a panoramic format that immediately evokes the idea of a film still from a strangely familiar movie.   For example ‘Asa Nisi Masa’ is taken from a scene in  ‘8 1/2’ by Federico Fellini, ‘Inferno’ (Romy Schneider’s eyes) and ‘Vortex ‘ are both from the unfinished film ‘Inferno’ by Claude Charbol while ‘Clown’ is a self portrait, and ‘Bra strap’, an image she found online. Treating existing images, framing and juxtaposing them in different ways, Justine questions the idea of authorship.She creates a fresh iconography and just as with iconoclasm: the destruction of an image creates a different image. Or with translation: as Jorge Luis Borges described in the often-quoted Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, translations produce new works.

In her own photography, Justine intentionally snaps figures and landscapes in a way that makes them difficult to locate. Her subjects reappear with slight variation out of context. She dislocates the viewers and prevents them from holding onto a fixed, defined, rational and tangible construct of traditional meaning and significance. Her plot goes nowhere or in an endless circle; time spans collide, progress, cancel each other or overlap; truth is continually ascribed and simultaneously denied; characters are artificially transported through the narrative, and the narrative itself is mixed up, riddled with gaps, ruptures, fissures and other holes which continually affirm that the image standing alone is perversely aware of itself as an image as well as being part of a narrative in parts that has little reference to any imaginable reality. The body of work is characterized by a puzzle that both drives the narrative and prevents it from being resolved. There is no clear causal logic in how everything fits together yet it does tell a story without fixing itself to any one author.

‘Statue’, a scene in  ‘Last Year in Marienbad’ by Alain Resnais, points to Justine's central concern with its theme centered on the relationship between the writer (author), the reader (subject) and the story (text). Like the Nouvelle Roman and Cinema movements of the late 60’s and early 70’s led by Alain Resnais, her preoccupation is with the shifts that continually occur between objective and subjective realities made possible through visual juxtaposition. These shifts in time and space engage the viewer with a multi-dimensional and interactive experience that allow the subject to acknowledge these effects and concepts. The images become points of intersection and dislocation in relationship to each other, perfectly interchangeable and somehow charged - figures frozen in movement in a masse tableau of fragmented interaction, familiar images cast in unfamiliar contexts - with a psychological tension that we, as viewers, cannot resist trying to fill in the gaps of, or attach a logical significance to, the deliberate disjuncture of the continuum.

As such, Justine radically addresses the submerged inconsistencies that are at the heart of imagery itself. The viewer asks questions: Are the images authored or appropriated? Are they fact or fiction? Are the images in the past or the present? Are they both and if so why? Is the selection and juxtaposition of images designed to give us privileged information or is its presentation casual and indifferent? Are the images part of a series of events being told through a character (the author)- or is there a character that is the creator of the images?   Many of these questions were found begging and unanswered in American cinema of the 40s and 50s – especially pulp detective fiction which depended on the Detective figure as someone who provided true and false information as part of a whodunit, a period she references in ‘Noire Lips’ and ‘Knife in the Back’.

They are even more relevant today with the birth of the information age which refocuses the image debate on the relationship between media and reality. Today, the discussion turns on whether media represents reality or whether media constructs reality. Justine suggests, with Slavoj Žižek, that there is a “virtualization of the real” - and that reality is layered, “constructed,” and that, between ontological reality, simulated reality and media reality there are no barriers anymore, only the translucent, easily penetrable sheets of shadow theater building layers to its own narratives. In our networked world, where bootlegs, copies, samples and remixes now hold equal footing with the original in terms of cultural production, Justine shows that iconoclasm is not the termination of an image, but rather the multiplication of that image into another possibility. In this sense, the original image is ahistorical and becomes a 'version' of itself created by the iconoclast's vandalism and recontextualization.

Justine lives and works in Los Angeles.  In addition to her artistic practice, she is currently working on a feature film ‘Powder Pulp'.