Adam Jeppesen

Adam Jeppesen
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Born	1978 Kalundborg, Denmark
Nationality	Danish
Citizenship	Denmark
Alma mater	Fatamorgana – The Danish School of Art Photography
Occupation	Visual artis

Adam Jeppesen (born in 1978 in Kalundborg, Denmark) is a Danish visual artist.

Adam Jeppesen graduated from Fatamorgana – The Danish School of Art Photography in 2002, but today he works within a number of media other than photography and explores various materials and printing techniques such as printing on textile. It is the aesthetic value of the imperfect, damaged and discarded that is explored in Jeppesen’s works, which are also characterized by Jeppesen’s labour-intensive approach - both post and prior to the development.

Key works and exhibitions

Wake

The series Wake has been created over a period of seven years and was in 2008 published as a book by the German publishing house Steidl. The series consists of selection of photographs that Jeppesen took over the course of seven years, while traveling alone on assignment, and the series therefore documents the constant change in the surroundings during his journeys. But rather than minister to any notion of Nordic melancholy, Jeppesen reconstructs history into an intuitive, dream-like sequence that reflects the emotional and aesthetic clarity afforded by solitude. Empty landscapes, empty rooms and empty streets with only a few living beings are present across the book – apart from the traveler himself.

The works’ large format is inspired by the German tradition within documentary photography, which is characterized by its tendency to classify. In that way, Wake functions as a visual register of the surrounding nature, but also of what seems indefinable. Because as the title also suggests, the photographs are somewhere between darkness and twilight, and in that way, they obscure as much as they reveal.

Flatlands Camp Project

Flatlands Camp Project was in 2012 exhibited at The National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen. The series consists of a number of contemporary landscape photographs, which were shot during Jeppesen’s 487-day long journey from Arctica, through North and South America, to Antarctica. Here, Jeppesen explored what role photography plays in our perception and memory – and how these are affected by solitude.

But even though the series is characterized by personal experiences and impressions, it distinguishes itself from personal travel records, and neither do the images have much in common with traditional travel reportage. Instead what emerged was a series of melancholic, evocative landscape pictures, almost dream-like. The analogue film from which the works have been developed contains damages, scratches, folds and other physical traces, which have also left their marks on the works. These marks and artifacts of Jeppesen’s process erode his originally sharp and clear images in much the same way as time and emotional distance can erode one’s original experience of a place. This transience and fragility is also found in Adam Jeppesen's later works, for example in the monumental installation The Great Filter from 2019.

In Flatlands Camp Project, the creation process itself was just as important as the finalized works, which is why the works were produced throughout a long period of time following Jeppesen’s journey. In that way, the journey has never ended, but has instead been continued through the postproduction. Jeppesen’s artistic interventions (the printing processes, materials and presentation) transforms the photographs into art objects that cannot be considered as distinct from the processing method and that explore photography as a physical process. Here, the reproducible medium becomes an artistic object and something unique, which can be both more three-dimensional and sculptural

The Pond

The Pond revolves around the pond as an allegory and is created out of a fascination with the processes through which something broken down in order to let something new emerge – and how these take place unaffected by humans. An uncontrolled, wild environment that takes care of itself and does not allow itself to be controlled. It is thus the transformative aspect of transience that forms the foundation of the series. The Pond consists of a number of cameraless depictions of hands, and the blue tone stems from the photographic process cyanotype, a chemical method that uses sunlight and where salts from the emulsion create a distinctive blue color. This process is taken a stage further by Adam Jeppesen, who has moved from conventional cyanotypes to three-dimensional work with dyed cloth in The Pond, which is strung in the middle of the tank.

The fabric also refers to another part of the exhibition, which are the explorations of hands that have been transferred from a negative to textile through the use of cyanotype. The hands are separate from the body and thus creates a floating illusion, like the fabric in the tanks. Jeppesen’s artistic practice often revolves around themes such as identity and discrepancy, but The Pond also works with a wider understanding of collectivism through the hand as motif. The hand symbolizes both the self and humanity as a whole, and this duality is central to the series.

The Great Filter

In 2019, The Great Filter was presented at Brandts Museum of Photographic Art in Odense (2019-2020). The exhibition consisted of a large, flat work cast in porous concrete and spread out on more than 150 m2 as a landscape of collapsing forms. Almost like sandcastles, these constructions where stood lined up next to each other, and creating something that could be interpreted as a city in the desert. Also, the sides of the installation were flanked by six sculptures in the same material, which had been placed in glass cases.

This landscape of sand constructions stood as if frozen in the process of breaking down, and in that way, the work places itself somewhere between the perfect and the imperfect as well as between creation and destruction, which has been Jeppesen’s focus in a large part of his oeuvre.

Selected exhibitions

Rencontres Arles / Centre de culture contemporaine de Nantes: On Earth (2020)

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam: On Earth (2020)

Brandts Museum of Photographic Art: The Great Filter (solo exhibition) (2019)

Black Box Projects: Fundamentals (2019)

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: Of Individuals and Places – Photographs from the Lazare Collection (2019)

Gallery Nouva: Sculptural Landscapes Part 2 (2019)

Museo Nazionale della Montagna: Post Water (2019)

Chapelle de la Trinité: L’art dans les chapelles (2018)

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam: Loading… (2018)

C/O Berlin: Back to the Future (2018)

Copenhagen Photo Festival: Sculptural Landscapes (2018)

Denver Art Museum: New Territory (2018)

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam: Back to the Future (2018)

Martin Asbæk Gallery: Adam Jeppesen (solo exhibition) (2017)

Kunst Haus Wien: Visions of Nature (2017)

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam: Out of Camp (soloudstilling) (2017)

Galerie van der Mieden: The Pond (solo exhibition) (2017)

Bendana Pinel: Extraits de la plaine (solo exhibition) (2017)

C/O Berlin: Out of Camp (solo exhibition) (2016)

Gallery Taik Persons: Vaca Muerta (solo exhibition) (2016)

Museum Het Schip: Touched – Craftsmanship in Contemporary Photography (2016)

Fotomuseum Antwerp: Mijn Vlakke Land (2015)

V1 Gallery: Hindsight (2014)

Northern Photographic Center: Rendezvous with nature (2013)

Peter Lav Gallery: På papiret (2013)

Galerie van der Mieden: Flatlands Camp Project (solo exhibition) (2012)

The National Museum of Photography: Flatlands Camp Project (solo exhibition) (2012)

O. Founier: Blue (soloudstilling) (2012)

Peter Lav Gallery: The Flatlands Camp Poject – Beyonder (solo exhibition) (2011)

Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow: Arctic (2011)

Galleri Image: On Sleepwalking (solo exhibition) (2009)

Peter Lav Gallery: Saimaa (solo exhibition) (2008)

Galleri Hornbæk: The Wake (solo exhibition) (2006)

Faulconer Gallery: Scandinavian Photography II: Denmark (2005)

Publications

Error, Object, Structure. Plethora Magazine, Frederiksberg, 2019. ISBN 978-87-998687-2-8

In Tremolo. Plethora Magazine, Frederiksberg, 2017. ISBN 978-87-998687-1-1

Flatlands. Plethora Magazine, Frederiksberg, 2015. ISBN 978-87-998687-0-4

Wake. Steidl, Göttingen, Tyskland, 2008. ISBN 978-3865216458

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