Danish installation artist Jesper Just, a former participant in Future Projections and jury member for our 2006 Visions prize, returns with a new signature work. He has long been interested in the mechanics of film drama and the emotions it produces in its audience: melancholy, longing, solitude and especially male vulnerability. He strips down cinema to its essential parts to explore how these effects are elicited, at the same time creating exceptionally beautiful and moving short films in their own right. In A Vicious Undertow, Just's protagonists whistle to a slowed-down, instrumental Nights in White Satin in an elegant, Asian-inspired bar. The women exchange smouldering glances, the older one touching her neck, the younger one fondling the dark lacquered panel beside her. They dance together, waltzing silently as the camera circles them, exchanging partners until the older woman is alone, watching her object of affection enraptured by a young man. Then she turns and finds herself outside on a wintry night, ascending an iron-railed staircase that seems to spiral endlessly upward around a tower-like building, the city lights far below her. As in Just's previous films, unnamed characters dance, sing, watch and cry in emotionally ambiguous tableaux. This time, however, the artist is as interested in the female gaze as he is in the male.
Laurel MacMillan
Curated by Mia Nielsen.
Presented by the Drake Hotel in association with Future Projections.
Courtesy of Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen
September 10 – 19, 2009
Drake Hotel
1150 Queen Street West
Nightly, 9 pm to 4 am
FREE to the public
Jesper Just is a Danish artist who lives and works in Copenhagen and New York. Recent exhibitions include the Miami Art Museum, the Witte de With in Rotterdam, the Brooklyn Museum and the Liverpool Biennial.