The film and exhibition are the fruit of a decade-long project combining academic research and artistic experimentation around the work of American artist, Jay DeFeo. Rosa Joly draws inspiration from DeFeo’s photographs of her immediate surroundings and everyday objects in the early 1970s to create an experimental and highly contemplative work.
The short film brings together art scenes and visual references that surround Rosa Joly in her personal and professional life. She interweaves tributes to various artists who have shaped the history of fine art and cinema (Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner, Carl Theodor Dreyer) with allusions to her own art scene, thus creating a community unbound by space and time. The film examines the fraught and ambivalent relationship between the object and living body, the inanimate and animate. Rosa Joly recalls that still lifes can be viewed as portraits: even if no living body is visible, life is still present.
Rosa Joly
Born in 1986, Rosa Joly lives and works in Berlin and Paris. She studied at the fine arts school in Lyon and at the Kunsthochschule in Hamburg. Her plastic work crosses several disciplines such as painting, installation, sculpture, writing and photography. She has exhibited at MOM Artspace, Hamburg (2019), the Falckenberg Collection, Harburg (2017), Kunsthaus Hamburg (2016), DOC!, Paris (2019) and La Traverse, Marseille (2022). Rosa Joly was a resident of contemporary art centre, Triangle-Astérides, in Marseille in 2021, the year she participated in the creation of Scheusal, an exhibition space in Berlin.
