Julie van der Vaart

Blind Spot

Poetically exploring the concepts of imaginary time and deep time is something Julie van der Vaart (b. 1988, The Netherlands) brings to the forefront in her latest monograph Blind Spot. She was fascinated by time and space already since childhood as she adored visualizing the unimaginable in her head. By presenting images of the human body, caves, and waterfalls in a complex sequence, she attempts to disclose the discrepancies between imaginary time and experienced linear time. Van der Vaart found Blind Spot to be the perfect title for her publication as it’s a place where “the optic nerve connects to the retina and no light-sensitive cells are present. The brain fills in the empty space based on the information surrounding the blind spot. The title acts as a metaphor for the potential divergence – the trick of the mind – between what we see and experience, and what is real.”

Composed over six years, she used parts of her archive to compile a new body of work filled with a multitude of analogue printing techniques. Experimental silver gelatin prints are intertwined with photo etchings and silkscreen prints, they are showcased in the book on a mesmerizing matt paper that sometimes gives her landscapes a metallic feel. The majority of images have chemical splashes on top of them, infusing them with a mysterious and otherworldly quality. The photographs are abstract and metaphorically referencing each other – the caves symbolically represent a human body while the bodies echo the landscapes back. Immersed in darkness, her esoteric images are mingling between appearance and disappearance. Consequently, browsing through the pages becomes a wholesome experience as we begin to sense the patterns in the sequence, giving the impression of time as a melting entity, stretched to its maximum.

Interestingly, van der Vaart shows primarily female bodies. However, as we are still very much used to the portrayal of women where men tend to have an active role while females are the passive ones in the dominant visual culture, we do not see this trend in Blind Spot. Portrayed through a female gaze, the bodies’ forms and shapes are accentuated instead of merely serving the purpose of “to be looked at”. They become a portal to the imaginary as they allow us to project on them our thoughts and fantasies in relation to time and space and not necessarily erotics. Therefore, they adopt an eminently active role in this case. 

At the end of her book, one can find a text – a compilation of reflections on time, featuring quotes from Alice in Wonderland, Stephen Hawking, Aldous Huxley, and many more, triggering our imagination. After being exposed to van der Vaart’s own universe through her experimental works, the text keeps our mind drifting away to a multiverse of thoughts far from linearity, to the blind spot of possibility.

Linda Zhengová, book review Blind Spot for Discarded magazine
january 2023

The Field of The Unknown

In the transition between perception and comprehension, different states of reality interpose themselves.

Some information is so extreme in dimension, both of space and time, that we must reconsider the very idea of representation. Our senses can be unreliable tools to capture our surroundings. How to understand something that by its very nature is unrepresentable?

Is it possible to fully understand something without being able to visualize it? And what is the role of imagination within this incomplete equation? Can we train the imagination? The artists in the exhibition confront themselves with this problem in an attempt to understand and visualize the invisible.

Deep Time, by Julie van der Vaart, captures the insides of caves through photopolymer etches based on analogue photographs. The continuous and prolonged mineral depositions take form due to the water percolating between the rocks. The water defines the shape of the cave, first over centuries, then over the course of millennia. It’s shaped into a sculptural body that is, by its very nature, a single giant mass of time. The artist explores the rocky interior and traps these shapes in her photos. This gesture has a double value. It visually captures the immersive and evocative potential of these forms, containing a sense of time that arches out of scale compared to human proportions while capturing an instant through the film in order to tear it away from the inexorable and silent process of transformation.

Momentum, by Fabio Roncato, is conceived as an inquiry on the representation and experience of a moment in time. A series of sculptures, that are created through the contact between two liquid elements: melted wax and the watercourse of a river. The wax is thrown into the watercourse, where it’s cooled by the mass of the river. This determines the shape of the sculpture in one single moment. From the water emerges a form still in tension, a cast of the river flow, a clash between two elements that crystallize matter and time. The form is made solid in metal by using the lost wax technique. The final sculpture vibrates an instant in time. It preserves the shapes outside their original temporal context, in a dimension of eternal suspension.

The constant falling of drops from the inlets of the rocks are like a river flow; two reflections that show time through the element of water, and that charge this element to deliver this value to our imagination in all its shapes. The artists make these researches converse, different in appearance but born from the urgency to understand time in its inaccessible dimensions. The forms of this research will be the sketches that will trace a path within the field of unknown.

Fabio Roncato on the exhibition The Field of The Unknown at Ingrid Deuss Gallery
December 2020

The Caves don’t Care, 
a reflection on the meta-reality in the work of JVDV.

An inner conflict?

In a decade’s time Julie van der Vaart evolved from a promising photographer into a weathered artist. JULIE VDV has the DNA of the scientist-philosopher-naturalist-explorer. She keeps seeking for different angles on a set of recurrent underlying themes. Her themes are: subjectivity of time, mathematical singularity, vastness of the cosmos, mortality, nature, and thus also the driving force of the universe: eros.

But at the heart of the oeuvre of Julie van der Vaart also sits a timid, yet abundant, mystery. 

In a way, her photography seems to articulate an inner conflict between passion for science and a suppressed feeling for spirituality. This wonderful duality has trickled down in the latter artworks in her libraric, analogue oeuvre. 

Throughout this oeuvre JVDV develops form and method to keep up with the requirements of her themes. Science, time, cosmos and spirituality are hence translated in star spangled nudes, esoteric b&w landscapes, and now, in her most recent work; in polymer prints of timeless caves.

How puny and lucky we are.

Art photography, at its core, is deceptive. It is practically never about what the eye can see, but rather suggests and seduces. At this point, JVDV jumps from physics into metaphysics while she goes through registering, mapping and reproducing. Be it nudes, stars, mountains, landscapes or caves, each of the subjects is processed with grand feeling. You will find yourself easily pulled into the resulting images.

Beyond the underlying philosophical preoccupation, you will find an ongoing, unstoppable pulsation driving the oeuvre. Even in images with total human absence lives a ubiquitous feeling of meta-reality and great humanity. Her dreamy star spangled nudes make you reflect on how puny and lucky we are as a species in the vast cosmos, whereas the recent work on cold caves might make you ponder e.g. over an early start of the Anthropocene somewhere around 6000 BC.

The caves don’t care / Sculpting the Dark.

Underneath the crust carrying the human species, there are wonderful palaces formed by time, water and calcium bicarbonate. The surface of the crust (and even the space surrounding this waning globe) is explored, probed, mapped, adventured and exploited to its very maximum. The dark insides on the other hand, remain unexplored. You might even think: respected, revered. 

In Japanese shinto religion, some special places in nature are revered as Kami. Holy places of respect and worship. Caves have something like this about them, we approach them with imprinted awe, for caves are the belly of the world, they are the abdominal abyss of ancient memory. Once they provided womblike shelter to the hunter-gatherers who printed their red pigmented hands on rocky walls; a most enigmatic artistic expression which succeeded to reach us through time.

To enter a cave you will need a torch, and to photograph it you will need to set up a flash. You will try to light up a more or less calculated perimeter of the pitch dark, but the result will be most capricious. Any adding of light, or flash, will oblige you to try and retry a step by step sculpting of the dark. If you would be trying to document the space true to nature, you might try bracketing (several layers with different lighting, which can be joined in photoshop). 

If you don’t do it this way, the sides of the cave are bound to be underexposed, and the sides will fall into darkness. But that’s where the magic happens. Caves intrinsically resemble stage and backstage, ready for mind-play. Hence caves still are able to fall into the imaginative spectrum of dragons, ruins, centaurs, mermaids and other mythical fairytale material.

Most of us seldom visit the intestines of the earth to see caves with our own eyes, so we need to help our imagination and memory with photos. This results in a wonderful contrast; images aiming at representation of caves will always be inapt for exact documenting just because of the forceful pulling of the unseen and the invisible beyond the frame, and at the fringes. This darkness easily feeds a very potent, dormant fantasy; which happens to coincide with the very aim of any exclusional approach in photography.

He who descends into the world of caves, descends into matters of existence

“Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. It may be one's link to more primitive animal instincts”. Even a small step into a cave is a psychological journey. Your brain experiences 1 fear, 2 wonderment, 3 wisdom, but you will also start to lose track of human time.The caves don’t care about human time, and clearly - neither does JVDV.

Technique:

In Beyond Time, Julie van der Vaart worked with darkroom and chemicals in order to reach the right expression for her ephemere timeless bodies. For the caves series she once again searched for the right method of expression which she found in photopolymer printing. The photopolymer prints are unique objects and are thus connecting with photo history in a well contemplated contemporary approach.

Peter Waterschoot on the series Deep Time
August 2019

Beyond Time

Twijfel wordt ondergewaardeerd. Is kunst niet de plaats bij uitstek waar mág getwijfeld worden? Fotografie is voor Julie van der Vaart alvast een geschikt medium om te wikken en te wegen. En een ideale ruimte om vragen te stellen. Over de kosmos bijvoorbeeld, en over tijd en ruimte.

Bij Ingrid Deuss Gallery hangen momenteel kleine prints van naakte, menselijke lichamen - fragmentarisch in beeld gebracht en als kostbare relikwieën gepresenteerd. Zwart-wit en een zeldzame keer in kleur. Nu eens lijken de lichamen op te lossen in de fotografische drager, soms is het alsof ze net te voorschijn komen. Steeds vormen ze het resultaat van een experimenteel ontwikkelproces. Lees: negatieven die nu eens langer of net minder lang ontwikkeld zijn, het licht dat even is aangestoken in de donkere kamer, prints die met chemicaliën bewerkt zijn of verschillende papieren dragers die zijn uitgetest. Niets nieuws onder de zon, verzuchten we, vernieuwing is een illusie.

Wat Julie van der Vaarts werk wél verfrissend maakt is hoe ze de wereld en zichzelf ziet vanuit de kosmos, als een nietig stipje in een constant veranderend, oneindig groot geheel. Die zelfrelativering lezen we in de vrijheid en de wendbaarheid van haar fotografie, dat duidelijk niet de taal is van een technische controlefreak, maar wel van een uiterst gevoelig persoon die kan loslaten. We staan hier oog in oog met de taal van iemand met een grote interesse voor tijd- en ruimtebeleving. Niet de klassieke lineaire tijd en een vastgepinde ruimte fascineert de Nederlandse fotografe, maar wel de de tijd en ruimte die we ons amper kunnen voorstellen. Bijvoorbeeld verschillende momenten (zoals vandaag, gisteren en morgen) die tegelijk plaatsvinden. Of deeltjes die tegelijk op verschillende plaatsen zijn. Kortom: een imaginaire tijd en ruimte. En net in dat speelveld, daar bevindt zich de fotografie van Julie van der Vaart.

Die wetenschappelijke dimensies gaat de fotografe tot op zekere hoogte onderzoeken. Niet zo gedetailleerd als haar vriend die biomedische wetenschappen studeerde, maar wel met een gretige belangstelling voor alles wat met astrofysica en kwantummechanica te maken heeft. Deze specifieke aandacht is ook in haar andere werk - dat weliswaar niet op de tentoonstelling te zien is - aanwezig. Julie van der Vaart richt er haar licht op eeuwenoude landschappen en grotten. Maar voor de expo bij Ingrid Deuss Gallery is er voor een duidelijke focus gekozen, namelijk naakte lichamen die meanderen tussen zijn en niet zijn, tussen zich hier bevinden of elders, tussen het verleden en de toekomst. Of alles tegelijk. Nee, laat varen alle hoop, gij die dit werk probeert te begrijpen.

Sofie Crabbé on the solo exhibition Beyond Time at Ingrid Deuss Gallery for H ART magazine
March 2018

Haunting Nude Photographs Evading Time and Space 

Yesterday, today, tomorrow. It is an inherent part of the human condition to think in timelines: where we’ve been, where we are, where we are going. But for Dutch artist Julie van der Vaart, this is a limited perspective. “When I was a child I looked at the stars and I could really imagine space going on forever. I had panic attacks because it wasn’t just above, but also below, and left, and right,” she explains. “I could envision space that went beyond the boundaries of my mind. When you close your eyes you see ‘an image’. What I was imagining went beyond that."

“Then I found out about the theory of imaginary time, in which time is not linear, you can move around in it. Then I knew that however things happen, everything was going to be fine; I’m already there, it’s already happening.”

Van der Vaart was a student of science and mathematics, forever absorbing information. When it came to her Masters, however, she strongly felt she needed to create, to put something out into the world. She looked first to fashion photography, but found it didn’t fit, so she turned her lens instead to portraiture. “I struggled a lot at the beginning because I didn’t know anything about photography or images or how to make a good image,” she says. “Everything was really bad.”

Her professors at the Media, Arts and Design Faculty in Genk, Belgium, thought differently. They pushed her towards the medium and in 2011, she won the golden lens award at the 33rd International Photo-Festival in Knokke-Heist with an image depicting a boy on a bed, staring into nothing.

It would take leaving her studies to begin the process of developing a style. She revelled in the freedom to experiment, to take pictures unrestrained by both the boundaries of education and the weight of expectation. Unlike many of her contemporaries who were fixated on technology, Van der Vaart looked for images that evoked feeling. She found a muse in her boyfriend – though not the person himself, his body.

Bodies became a recurrent theme, employed as a means to express an idea. Intuitively too, the photographer leaned towards landscapes. “In nature you can find beauty and also the opposite – horror,” she says. “When you’re quiet you let yourself become one with nature, you have all the answers. It’s not meditative, but true, honest and real.”

Her oeuvre now encapsulates both bodies and landscapes, shot in analogue and black and white. “If you have colour you have this extra layer of information,” she explains. “You get more of the essential, central things if you get rid of that.” Romantic, sombre, ethereal, eerie; Van der Vaart’s work is both conceptual and “poetical”. She likes the balance between her own ideas and the viewer’s interpretation – that they can feel something while knowing nothing.

Beyond Time combines the artist’s fascination with the concept of time and her longstanding muse, the human body. Inspired by quantam mechanics – and in particular, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time – she wanted to create timeless photographs, images that do not exist within the confines of the here and now. To do so, she experimented with chemicals to craft a cosmic effect within the images. The bodies on show look as though they could be dissolving into space, or emerging from it – or perhaps doing both simultaneously.

In a departure from her usual approach the collection includes a small number of prints in blue, to break the flow. The results are haunting and hypnotic; a series of intangible figures, floating in a world beyond our imagination.

Edwina Langley on the series Beyond Time for AnOther magazine
February 2018

Beyond Time

De kosmos fluistert op de foto’s van Julie van der Vaart.

Haar foto’s waren te zien tijdens de open dagen van de Jan van Eyck studio’s, als een prachtige transparante wolk uitwaaierend over de muur. Van der Vaart bewerkte deze foto’s in de donkere kamer om ze op te laten lossen in de vaste materie. We zien lichamen die nauwelijks tevoorschijn komen, lichamen zwevend in de ruimte. De kosmos heeft zijn tanden er al in gezet: de materie is aangetast en gespikkeld. De lijven verdwijnen in het oneindige, de een is al verder weg dan de ander, bijna onherkenbaar: een arm, een been of tussen een arm en een been in, met ogen op de tast doe ik een gok.

De serie heet Beyond time, over de nietige mens in de onmetelijke tijd. Over het heelal dat onbegrijpelijk groot is. Als mens is het niet te bevatten, we spreken over lichtminuten en lichtjaren, een lichtminuut is de afstand die het licht in een minuut aflegt. Licht reist 300.000 kilometer per seconde en dat maal 60 dan kom je uit op een lichtminuut: 18 miljoen kilometer. De reis naar de zon is acht lichtminuten. Maar nog intrigerender is dat als een astronoom door zijn kijker naar Pluto kijkt, dan kijkt hij vijf uur in de tijd terug. Want het beeld van Pluto heeft vijf uur nodig om hier naar toe te komen.

Dit intense besef van onmetelijkheid drukt ons op het betrekkelijke van ons ons speldenprikkenbestaan. In de foto’s van Julie van der Vaart reizen we mee in de tijd, we drijven weg van de aarde het heelal in en daar moeten we het loslaten. Of we vooruitblikken of juist achteruitkijken, dat doet er niet meer toe. Naarmate we meer weten wordt het fenomeen tijd enkel complexer maar er valt goed te leven in een onbegrijpelijke wereld.

Hanne Hagenaars on the series Beyond Time for the exhibition You Want It Darker at garage Rotterdam
October 2017

Vistas of The Sublime

Julie van der Vaart is a Belgium based Dutch artist who has been receiving recognition for the enigmatic, monochrome photography emerging from her darkroom. Her most recent series, ‘Mountains, waves and skies’, immerses the viewer in abstracted natural landscapes, reflective seascapes and the observable cosmos. These panoramas appear as metaphors across time and space and, like much of her practice, meet at the intersection of art and science.

Introducing this series with an extract from Lord Byron’s narrative poem, ‘Childe Harold's Pilgrimage’, Julie van der Vaart invites the viewer to recognise her images within the long tradition of artists and poets romanticising the landscape. Her high-contrast views echo Byron’s journey into an idealised natural beauty, in which ‘the sky, the peak, the heaving plain/Of ocean, or the stars, mingle’. Like the written verses of the Romantic poets, these images illustrate authentic aesthetic experiences and an appreciation of the elements: earth, water, air.

Julie van der Vaart deliberately invokes pictorial conventions developed by the Romantic landscapists as a means of representing sites and states of the sublime. Where boundaries meet within the wilderness, there is a sense of our smallness: a wide expanse of starlit sky and deep, wave-tilted ocean converge; uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces overpower the viewer’s senses with gravitational force. A remote, alpine landscape or grand, snow-capped mountain range are deliberately and dramatically vast in scope, and rich in tonalities and textures. As the artist has expressed:

“I thought about the main subjects in nature which capture the sublime: the sea, the mountains, the sky above us. Places and subjects which seem huge and quiet, the enormousness of it can swallow me whole. It's threatening but also comforting at the same time”.

Contrary to trends in contemporary landscape photography ­­– hyper-real, digitally edited images or informal snapshots – Julie van der Vaart’s practice is distinguished by the poetic, moving beyond mere reportage. These analogue photographs preserve her sensations of, and connection to, the depth of a limitless landscape. The artist often takes solitary walks into secluded, untouched landscapes, and this series archives her “desire to become part of it… to melt into the landscape”. Particularly in her choice of mountains meeting skies, or trees reaching tall, there are connotations of the divine, and gateways to spiritual ascendance.

While Julie van der Vaart approaches the pictorial sublime as an artist, her work also reveals an appreciation of the landscape’s transcendence across place and time within the context of science. Interested in physics since her school days, Julie van der Vaart has, more recently, taken up the study of astrophysics and quantum mechanics. In her images of oceans and opalescent skies expanding as far as we can see there is a sense of an artist searching not for the scenic but our ephemerality amidst voids.

Moving beyond picturesque panoramas, these photographed landscapes depict deliberately anonymised spaces. Abstracted from actual locations, Julie van der Vaart focuses on unmarked terrains and vistas, untouched by human impact: these are places that have existed long before us, and which will outlast us too. As she reflects “When we are around, for example, mountains, that took such a long time to form (or the other subjects which formed so slowly and seem eternal) you can actually feel the sublime”.

Whilst Julie van der Vaart’s work can be divided into distinct subjects, with modern portrait photography contrasting with her landscapes, spanning her series is the concept of time. The temporal dimension and non-linear time have started to play an increasingly important role: “I got deeper into astrophysics and the theory of imaginary time, in which time is not linear and you can move around in it like in space, and in order for you to move around in imaginary time, all the moments from past and future exist together at the same time”.

In her portrait photography bodies seem to dissolve or appear in the cosmos, coming and going concurrently. Similarly, her landscapes emerge from, and disappear back into, the darkness. Images of foregrounded, ragged rocks beneath starry skies intimate craters on unfamiliar and unvisited planets, yet to be discovered in space. In this series, the sublime is situated in the artist’s concept of time, and timelessness, and our relative insignificance within it. This is particularly striking in the cosmology of skies and oceans balanced, defined and separated between stark horizon lines. The artist’s visual and vanishing wavelengths point towards infinity; and her photographs emerge in their own archived time-space, separate from both artist and viewer.

These landscapes are also defined by their meditative quality and effect. Deliberately using a limited vocabulary of black and white, as it is “less of a distraction” Julie van der Vaart allows for limitless interpretations of her images: earth or space, land or sky, the viewer decides. There is an effect of innate harmony and natural rhythm created through symmetrical images and aspect ratios dividing compositions in half: one part scenery, one part reflection; or one part sky to one part land. Moreover, this series sees the artist using tones of deep blue, inviting associations with melancholy and spirituality, and locating the landscape in an aura of peacefulness.

Throughout this transfixing series, the landscape is conceived of as a territory both familiar and unfamiliar, at once anonymous and universal. Her beautifully dark vistas of the world invoke Romantic associations of the sublime in the vastness and almost incomprehensible beauty of nature. At the same time, they locate it within the complexity of contemporary science, astrophysics and notions of the temporal dimension. Imposing a mere trace in time, her liminal landscapes evoke not nihilism but a sense of quiet solace. There is a compelling, contemplative quality to Julie van der Vaart’s ethereal and poetic re-imagining of ‘Mountains, waves and skies’.

Ruth Millington on the series Mountains, Waves and Skies for BKN magazine
November 2017

This Disconnecting Solace: Julie van der Vaart’s “Dusk”

I often find that in this glycerine and petrol indoctrined age of the anthropocene there is akin to this, the strange feeling of having a clear and suffocating plastic bag contortioned over my head and drawn at the neck to drown out the hum of traffic, strangers and light alike. There is something of a new eclipse in my mind under condition of claustrophobia. It is as if the inhalation of this plastic world is what makes sense from the pulpit of this discomfiture. It is only when the onset of the evening comes into proximity of this ever present metaphorical bag that it becomes difficult to read much meaning into anything external. Inside-my breath becomes laboured, the temperature drops and my eyes begin to dry out. If they could crack like mud, they would. The only sick sense of self-preservation that I have in this environment is not to let my body-drift too close to any of the awkward strangers that are encompassing me and to perhaps curtail the potential bruising of my limbs from chairs, street lamps, rusty implements of found torture and the like. My limbs are at this point, fairly useless. I’d like to lie on the floor or the street like a dog if the passersby were certain to leave my body alone in this condition, not that I’m sure I want to feel it anymore apart from perhaps the way the overhead leaves brush past it on their own way to the cold concrete under my feet.

Night brings distance. It is as if to say that a body dysmorphia forms, but only below the neck. In the bag, obfuscated, if beleaguered of breath, I come closest to my interior world, yet I am still carried away by those awkward active limbs that find a way to attach themselves to my floating cranium. When my head is encapsulated and a distance between it and the world occurs, I am closest to home, to night and to the abstraction of a consciousness that I seek to inhabit.

Julie van der Vaart's DUSK is a shrouded piece of photographic investigation into nocturnal unreason where silver nitrate meets the dim slow hum of dull bulbs or flickering candles at best. It is somber. The bodies within are posed with an unnatural grace in their soft recline. There is a memory within of Awoiska van der Molen or Daisuke Yakota’s work. The grain is stretched and strained to tension the image-not unfamiliar in the work of the aforementioned or perhaps even like Harmony Korine's "The Bad Son". In the Bad Son, fading Xerox copies of an adolescent Macaulay Culkin dissipate into scratchy dissolve through repetition and mechanical degradation and generational printing. Van der Vaart is not overly partial to repletion of her images, which makes the work different from all of the above. The curious work is monotone and hints at an abstraction of the natural world, which is pleasant somehow. If you need to see something that pushes past quiet rumination to that of excessive cow-towing to shock or extremes, you will not find it here. My allegory above is something of a passive current-a synaptic and immediate response to the work. It leaves room to ponder which is something sadly lacking in many books these days.

Brad Feuerhelm on the book Dusk for American Suburb X
March 2016