LAUREL JOHANNESSON INTERVIEW
Laurel Johannesson
Neither day nor night. Neither land nor sea. The image lives in a limbo space — waiting, quietly, for the end of the world.
The image is neither day nor night. It could be viewed as some sort of purgatory — or perhaps it's paradise.
Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits. Von Trier's Melancholia. The beach as catalyst.
The figures attain a form of self-realisation that is instinctive and corporeal. They are protected and at the same time exposed. One is crying, one accepting, another almost indifferent.
She thinks in narrative. What has just happened? What will happen next?
Laurel Johannesson's primary influence is cinema. Whether working on a still or moving image, she is plotting a course through a sea of stories rather than creating a single artwork. The figures in her work form a recurring cast — essentially the same individual playing different parts.
The beach is neither land nor sea. It is constant and yet constantly changing — a place of naked truth, of judgement, a site of initiation into consciousness. When she inserts a figure into a landscape, she asks: what is their posture saying? What part are they playing?
She is also shaped by philosophies of temporality — the invisible world and inner landscapes, spaces where time is stretched to infinity, where delicate shifts of light can create an eternity.
An image that is subtly uncomfortable. An awkwardness not immediately obvious.
Filmmaking is about creating the illusion of reality — a poetic impression, not a recreation. The "day for night" technique gives the illusion of a night scene while shooting in full sunlight. Even after underexposing and filtering, the sunlight leaves its traces: unnaturally sharp shadows, a sky illuminated in ways no camera could capture at night.
These uncanny, uncomfortable residues are what attract her. She strives to replicate them — the extreme shadows, the brightly lit night sky, the image that belongs to neither world. Neither day nor night. Neither purgatory nor paradise. You decide.
Her current work animates these images: certain aspects remain static and frozen in time while other parts move subtly in the wind, or are rained upon in a torrential downpour.
A strange form of time travel — mining an enormous archive of memory and light.
She has created an enormous archive of what she calls "base images" — collected during extended periods in Greece and Italy, photographing locations and figures in response to the place. The narrative is worked out later, in the studio.
Once back, she searches through the archive — sometimes for a specific location — and is taken back to where and when she photographed. She can almost feel the negative ions from the sea. Then the process flows, and the real work begins.
The final images live across multiple surfaces — each with its own relationship to light, time and the viewer. Printed metal holds the image like a mirror that refuses to reflect. The lightbox breathes. The moving image waits.
Combinations of celestial bodies with the body on shorelines in Greece
The figure and the cosmos collapse into each other on the shore. Scale dissolves.
Uncanny juxtapositions between body and nature, realism and dream
Neither alive nor still. Neither real nor imagined. The figure stands in both worlds simultaneously.
Our understanding of time and space — stretched toward infinity
Delicate shifts of light create an eternity. Sound goes beyond hearing. The image holds its breath.
The machine, disguised as an illuminated photograph, notices you.
Since 2008, she has worked with interactive and generative systems — but was frustrated when interactivity made work feel mechanical, destroying the subtle aesthetic emotion she sought. The investigation into temporality became the solution.
She does not want the viewer to be immediately aware that the machine is responsive. Rather, the more time they spend with the image, the clearer it becomes that their presence has been noticed and is being responded to — a synthetic natural phenomenon.
"We should start to think of machines less as boxes of practicality and more as generic control mechanisms for mediating all kinds of interactions and stimuli."
— Elise Co · quoted by Laurel JohannessonHer practice spans still photography taken underwater and at the shoreline, digitally collaged into images that are then printed on metal, on paper, and as bespoke lightboxes. Lately she animates them — parts frozen, parts alive.
She is working on an interactive moving image that responds to the viewer's presence. She describes it as a long story — one she is still inside.
still & moving
real & imagined
Interactivity
Moving Image
@laurel_johannesson
Greece · The Shore · Between Day & Night
