Rachel de Joode’s work revolves around a tension between the flatness of the pixelated screen and the fleshiness of the porous body. While many of her photographs take on the appearance of human skin or organic matter, upon closer inspection the images come into focus as renderings of elemental artistic materials, such as clay or pigment, that bear the imprint of de Joode’s hands. Throughout de Joode’s work there is an oscillation between two-dimensional surface and three-dimensional corporeality. Images are embraced in the round as visceral and bodily. They inhabit the space of the haptic in which touch is experienced with the eyes.
Indeed, this sensorial confusion also extends to the artist’s approach to her medium. For de Joode, a photograph is a tool for the mediation of her physical experience with matter. It is also a way to channel the desire of the artist into the form of her materials. As such, her image-objects have agency; they become subjects. They perform as other mediums, troubling the traditional boundaries of their frames. This performance of the art object extends to the context of the exhibition itself and to de Joode’s role as its artist-protagonist.
Alex Klein.