Your Own House: Maurice Van Es

From the series “The Past is a Strange Place” via Maurice Van Es

Way, waaaaaay late, but check out my feature on Dutch photographer Maurice Van Es over at Paper Journal. I looked at and discuss a few of Van Es’s projects, including To me you are a work of art, The past is a strange place, and Textures of childhood. He’s got some really great images, and straddles the lines between dreamy and crisp, and claustrophobic and familiar in a very interesting way. An excerpt:

In To me you are a work of art, he trains his camera to Duchampian ‘sculptures’ created by his mother – a pile of folded towels, two remote controls stacked upon one another – making his parents’ home a sort of museum to the art of domesticity. Van Es’s photographs are remnants of everyday existence, modern ruins and ziggurats and pyramids of domesticity unwittingly cast in cloth or wood. They are accidental monuments to a crisp moment, a memory preserved in pixels. Yet they are terribly familiar. According to Van Es, ‘You can find these traces in your own house too.’

I’m really excited to watch Van Es and see where his career grows from here – the dude’s like 24 years old and churning out some fantastic stuff.

via Maurice Van Es

I’ve got a few more projects in the works for Paper Journal that are coming soon, including a piece on one of the exhibitors at this month’s New York Art Book Fair, so keep an eye out for those.

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