We are delighted to have an opportunity to present Pablo Pijnappel alongside Paul Graham’s work, with Pijnappel representing a young, experimental artistic position that addresses the narrative structures of photographic images.

“Homer”, Pijnappel’s new installation, is a loose narrative based on the true story of Kevin Co, an American artist from a Filipino background. The slide show weaves together photographs and spoken text to create a narrative about the coming of age of the young man, who turned his back on New York at the age of 21 and went off to live quietly in the small city of Homer in Alaska.

By making it impossible to distinguish between fiction and documentation, Pijnappel picks up on his recurring autobiographical topic: the search for a father figure and emancipation from this figure through a journey into the geographical and cultural otherness of Alaska. The authentic biography of Kevin Co is adapted by the fictional character Spencer, whose story is intermeshed with Pijnappel’s in “Homer”. Pijnappel deploys self taken pictorial material of undefined origin that is however slotted together into a narrative as if in a collage. Their origin remains undefined, as in Pijnappels earlier works, not evoking the question of authenticity. “If you can reuse images that perfectly serve your objective, then why shoot them again? I don’t want to put more things on top of the pile. I just dig into this pool of already existing data“, to cite Pijnappel’s description of his slide collages.