On Wings

Dutch artist Juul Kraijer’s images seek to upturn our daily logic and rationality in favour of the incredulity and wonder of a world held beyond belief. She documents staged interactions between a model, often presented androgynously, and other sentient beings like birds and butterflies that appear in possession of their own consciousness and deportment. By juxtaposing their bodies in an unbounded encounter, Kraijer incites the primal reactions of bewilderment, awe and even fear in the vein of subliminal provocations explored by the Romantics in the nineteenth century especially in dealing with “things of beauty”, often explored as a nostalgic return to nature and natural elements. Her emphasis on the intensity of our emotional registers is enhanced by the tension between fear and fascination, alerting us to the intricacies and contradictions that make-up our individual experiences to collective or shared events exploring the interiority of the self as an embodiment of our physical forms and contours. On Wings features a suite of photographs, collages, drawings and a video work.