Lemons Gazing At Mount Etna

Lemons Gazing at Mount Etna brings together Lonneke van der Palen’s visual investigations. Premised upon the vernacular of the everyday, Van der Palen’s magnification of details transforms found objects into the protagonists of material culture.

"My artistic practice unfolds as an ever-growing visual investigation centered on one overarching theme: material culture and its preserved, unexpected aesthetic beauty. In my work, I am driven by a fascination with mundane scenes, rituals, modern artefacts, trash, treasures and objects, and their complex relationships with economic, cultural and historical contexts. I respond to existing spaces through carefully crafted compositions in which form, color and light deliberately relate to each other. During this process, I magnify subjects and reduce images to their pure essence, resulting in both visible and subtle shifts in everyday life.
Over the past few years, without any hierarchy, I have accumulated an extensive collection of photographs. Subjects range from plastic chairs, tablecloths, stray shopping bags, and jerry cans to rocks, tent cloths, exotic fruit, and boys in swimming trunks. Both in the studio and on location, my search is driven by a new way of perceiving and discovering unexpected visual pleasures, an overall sense of wonder, and the ability to view and capture everything with equal interest and attention. These found objects, their uses and meanings, are then revealed and communicated to the viewer through vivid images highlighting ephemeral details. The banal takes on an almost exalted status, as billboards for everyday scenes. Although pleasure is at the core, my strategy of revealing hidden beauty and unnoticed aesthetic values is accompanied by underlying notions of consumerism, natural resources, exploitation, and the origin and fabrication of objects."

At once a portable exhibition and a living archive, Lemons Gazing at Mount Etna is equally inspired by human actions and our interactions with objects. The publication itself playfully engages the reader in a game of association by inviting intervention in its presentation and sequencing. Considering alternative aesthetic modes through the artefacts of contemporary life, Lemons Gazing at Mount Etna is motivated by a renewed way of seeing.

The physicality and concept of Lemons Gazing at Mount Etna responds to the notion of material culture by incarnating an object that unfolds beyond its delimitations: the object (publication) is also an ephemeral event (exhibition). It can be experienced alone or collectively and favours an unwillingness to hierarchize, instead creating a possibility for interpretation, unpredicted amazement, play, and visual pleasure.

As a publication, Lemons Gazing at Mount Etna presents itself as a lush object in which always two half-images converge on each spread. An intriguing play of patterns, colours and shapes emerges from these combinations, offering new perspectives on the subjects. Viewing them fully requires removing the images from the publication, which adds a tangible dimension and reinforces the idea of rediscovery and renewed observation.

As an exhibition, Lemons Gazing at Mount Etna presents the pages of the publication as images on the walls of galleries, art spaces and museums, as well as in domestic settings or in public spaces. Thanks to the different sheet sizes, a dynamic display is created: compositions can be created with images of equal size, images can be hung on top of each other, and playful variations can be achieved by combining images of different sizes. The "curators" of these exhibitions have the freedom to arrange the material as they see fit, make unique creations, and thus participate in the authorship of the work.