Iska Jehl
Feed your soul
Photography
Mai 24 - July 7, 2007
Opening reception on Thursday, May 24,2007, 7 pm
The horizon, hidden behind a bluish grey veil of clouds, blends in with the smoke-blue of the gently stirring sea defined only through far away waves washing noiselessly over the beach’s heavy sand. On the crest of a rubble hill, a white hut on fragile stilts is outlined clearly from this dusty background, protrudes into the image like a foreign body which one has long since decided to condone, looks out over the turbid wide like a forgotten guard. “Soul house” (2007) Iska Jehl calls the hovering hut with the door that no ladder leads to and the window behind which the innermost lies deep in darkness.
„Feed your soul“ is he title of the exhibition in which Munich-based artist Iska Jehl presents her most recent work from May 24 to July 7, 2007 in Galerie Adler, Frankfurt am Main. With her latest two series’ quiet, atmospheric photographs, the visitor is seduced into opposite directions; in both series, a dissonance is perceptible, like a torn string in a cello concert. Yet, while behind the mood of loneliness and seclusion between longing memory and memento mori, the soul houses open up a way back into reality, in the second series the paradox situation of supposed bliss, ambiguous idyll and disappointment of one’s own expectations is unmasked as an illusion.
Iska Jehl searches for every-day, often unconsciously perceived spaces - or non-spaces - and asks for the individual taste and collective patterns. Found images simulating a beautiful dream world serve as starting point, are combined with her own photographs and then digitally manipulated, so that family idylls of real estate advertisement become blurred “Utopias of life” (2007) whose reality is at the same time affirmed and questioned.
Exhibition "simply
happy"
February 6, 2004 - MArch 27, 2004
opening reception: Friday, February 6, 2004, 6 pm
The titles of Iska Jehls photo series are called "At Home", Little Happiness",
"Barbie Forever", "Summer Day". They show the simple happiness in
prefabricated homes, in the “Schrebergarten” and, in their newest series, on
camping sites. There they stand , the homes on wheels together with folding
chairs and canary cages. Not on a common camping site, but, as everyone
dreams of, in green nature, completely alone, without annoying neighbours,
at an idyllic location.
But, of course, the happiness is not so stable, as it appears in the
foreground. Like in real life we must discover that the deep and durable
happiness which we believed to see is only superficially there or even
completely absent. "In this situation of the alleged happiness, the
ambiguous idyll and the disappointment of one’s expectations the artist Iska
Jehl is interested in. In her works she investigates the moments of
happiness of humans and at the same time exposes them as illusions ", states
Dr. Birgit Jooss of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich.
 Series Barbie forever, 2002 |
Also, her pictures are not simply photographs of only one reality. Iska Jehl
combines photos of painted landscapes with pictures from advertisement
catalogues and photographs of her own. With the help of the computer they -
smoothly - are connected and edited. In the series "Summer Day" she
eliminates the impairing elements such as fences or neighbouring campers. In
"Barbie Forever" she merges pictures of designer furniture for adults and of
cheap Barbie toy furniture. The digital treatment waives the size
differences. In these round pictures, Iska Jehl lets the viewer look through
keyholes at the dreams of beautiful living. |
Maybe her art helps us to better understand ourselves and our world.
It is
Iska Jehl’s answer to the time we live in.
 Silver, Series Summerday 2003 |
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