JULIA CHRISTE

ABOUT THE ARTIST

WORKS

A. White Sands Beach

B. Balloons

C. White Sands

D. Meeting Points

E. LIGHTBOX

ABOUT THE ARTIST

INTRODUCTION

WHITE SANDS As far as the eye can see With the weather acting up more and more, even the deserts do not remain pristine. Thus the new, and perhaps last chapter of Julia Christe’s „White Sands“ bears the name „White Sands Beach“. Massive rainfalls in the fall of 2006 transformed spectacular dunes into a lake district, and Christe set forth to intrude into this new landscape as far as to leave behind most visitors of the national park. „Where the American can’t drive, he doesn’t go“, her experience taught her. In this sense she chose the locations of her new works, that are completely staged, excluding passersby. Taken in this irresistible scenery, the pictures’ tension arises from the clash of precise conception, mapped by the photographer before, and the surprises awaiting her on scene. This time Julia Christe did not rely on mere hazard, she did not wait for passersby, but brought her protagonists along with her and equiped them with curious accessories. The photographic results hold at times hidden and other times offensive humor, coming up with catwalk associations, little man’s pool idyll and surreal jugglery. The open question on how tadpoles got into the newly emerged waters of White Sands not only busied biologists, Julia Christe too seems to have tranplanted it into her bizarre picture language: The presence of an Octoberfest-bavarian folk dance band from Garmisch-Partenkirchen remains an equally unsolved mistery as the origin of spawning frogs.Although the humorous note is much more developed than in the earlier chapters of White Sands, Julia Christes distinctive handwriting creates a special esthetic pleasure. Her purism is fatuating and the forlorn human figures become well set marks in the vastness of monochrome, vacillating plains. Meeting Point Julia Christe always makes room for plenty of sky in her photographs, giving the strict grid an unending breadth and peacefulness, setting the stage for subtle irony and a subliminal unsettledness with stainless surfaces, which avoid extraneous sleekness. Who’s walking around in these perfectly staged photographs? Who is the peculiar figure with a sombrero who creeps into Julia Christe’s new photographs? Whether on the American mainland, or in Australia or Hawaii, this entity, with its immense hat that reduces it to dwarf-like proportions, is always suddenly standing or crouching in the middle of grandiose landscapes as if it wants to take part in the natural experience. Sometimes it’s presenting a fish to a chorus line of pelicans; sometimes it’s perched on a withering tree looking out over our horizon. Hidden behind this odd figure is the continuous presence of the photographer herself who conspicuously resolves to capture the often grotesque affair between man and nature. As a variation to her series “White Sands,” in which people, like peripheral phenomena at the American National Park on their way into the light or perhaps into the future, eventually disappear, Julia Christe staged this person as a small, penetrating other-worldly figure who is at the same time likeable and a bit annoying: nature gone awry, perhaps? At any rate, it is a running gag throughout world history.