I'm officially obsessed with Dutch artist Scarlett Hooft Graafland.
Inhabiting the border between straight photography, performance and sculpture, Hooft Graafland’s photographs are records of her highly choreographed live performances in the salt deserts of Bolivia, the Canadian arctic, or mountainsides in China.
Fascinated by the surreal beauty of the harsh natural landscape, she utilizes this as her canvas. Anthropologically curious, her ideas emerge directly from the local mythology that originates in this otherworldly environment.
Using naïve and childlike color palettes her photographs draw on the language of the surreal showing familiar objects out of context (balloons dotted across a lake, top hats flying through the desert, a man resting on an igloo). Her humorous and unsettling juxtaposition of these everyday objects with the sparse, unforgiving landscape echoes the aesthetic of surrealists such as René Magritte. Hooft Graafland utilizes the medium of photography, associated with the representation of truth, to represent the fantastic and the irrational.
Dive into her work and never come back. It’s that beautiful.
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