New work from Simen Johan’s ongoing series of photographs and sculptures, Until the Kingdom Comes, which he began in 2005, depict a natural world that is at once familiar and otherworldly. Most, but not all, of the images are intricate digital constructs incorporating elements the artist photographed in various geographical locations. Towering giraffes, shot in various U.S. zoos, populate a hazy, desolate landscape created from images taken in Turkey, Bali and Iceland; spectacular Javan peacocks from Asia are camouflaged within a Spanish pepper tree; and the interior of an Icelandic volcano forms the setting for a gooey tar pit where Peruvian yellow-hooded blackbird’s nest. Each image confuses the boundaries between opposing forces such as the natural and the artificial, the beautiful and the eerie, the known and the unknown. These dynamic tensions reflect internal conflicts and contradictions inherent to human nature that fuel Johan’s work.

Solo exhibitions of Until the Kingdom Comes have been presented at the David Winton Bell Gallery of Brown University, Providence; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville; 21c Museum, Louisville; and the Pollock Gallery at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Johan’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Cleveland Museum of Art; Brandts Museum of Photographic Art, Denmark; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Denver Art Museum, among others. The artist received the Pollock- Krasner Foundation Grant in 2009 and was awarded the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Grant from Brown University in 2012. Simen Johan was born in Norway in 1973, raised in Sweden, and lives and works in New York City.

Image: © Simen Johan, Yossi Milo Gallery