Jesper Just

Some Draughty Window

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the loveliest in this bar? We all know the line and even though the story won’t be enacted, it is arguably the subtext to a scene often played out before washroom mirrors in the city’s restaurants and bars. You check your appearance, project your expectations into your reflection, compose your features and prepare to leave the room with your façade intact. Perhaps you were happy with what you saw, perhaps you saw old age and death creeping up on you, and perhaps you’d rather be someone else…and more. The mirror in the ladies at Karriere is as magical and vibrant as anything out of Snow White. A film begins in the mirror with an eye that looks back at you. An individual awakes as if from a trance and searches your gaze for affirmation of her existence and choices in a narrative about disguise and transformations and phantasmagorical grit. The video’s narrative plays out in a public washroom of the old fashioned, well-maintained sort, fitted with brass fixtures and mahogany doors. A space of the same type as that at Karriere whose separate gender washrooms create the overarching notion of gender as a setting for the narrative. The combination of a cramped cubicle and video connotes to the nearby sex shops and opens up a dreamscape zone for explorations of gender, fantasy and desire. Jesper Just is an artist who usually shows his works in cinema-like spaces: black boxes where his films are enjoyed in a soft, enveloping darkness, the world outside forgotten for a while. The technical standard of his productions makes this an apt choice. The videos, with their dazzling images and pathos-filled music, are captivating in the extreme. A love for the aesthetics of some of Hollywood’s most prominent directors is manifested in the images, but for the narratives, Just departs from the conventional schema: idyll → conflict and crisis → the struggle for the reinstatement of order and harmony and a happy ending. Not marked by significant external action, Just’s stories are more about choosing and creating scope for choice through confronting and resolving buried feelings and yearnings. (PKE)

Jesper Just, born 1974, Denmark
www.jesperjust.com

• artwork