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January 9 – February 21, 2004

Galleri Christina Wilson is happy to present Danish artist Jesper Just’s (*1974) first solo-show. He graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen last year 2003. For the exhibition Just has produced three videos: No Man is an Island II (2004), The Sweetest Embrace of All (2004) and A Fine Romance (2004).

... a young man, eyes moistened with tears, croons Roy Orbison’s love song Crying to the accompaniment of backing vocals provided by four elderly men. Two men locked in an embrace roll around on the floor between chairs and tables to the sound of an ever increasing heartbeat and the angelic vocal of a choirboy. A woman, seated on the very edge of a sofa, memorises passages from a fairy-tale while a man dances before her stripped to the waist. All these situations are taken from Jesper Just’s three latest videos which are all set in strip clubs. These scenarios are not, perhaps, in any way typical of the strip club milieu. Strippers in provocative postures are only present on posters and paintings hanging on the walls of the club. And only one item of clothing – a t-shirt – is removed in any of the three films.

The three videos are not a trilogy as such, nor do they comprise a single narrative. Much like Just’s other works, however, the three films are closely related thematically. They are also related in terms of their common setting. Just is investigating male-roles (and in a lesser degree female roles) within the framing of mainstream Hollywood movies. The Hollywood movie has if anything given us a collective consciousness for how men and women are, how they look and how they act. But the Hollywood structure is often simplified, clichéd and stereotyped. Through Jesper Just’s images and stories of men and women Just cleverly deconstructs the hegemony of this ideology, partly creating a foundation for an alternative understanding of these relations, and partly creating a basis for new types of relation which are strange and heartbreaking.

Jesper Just is strongly inspired by film. He differs in this respect from the trend in contemporary art that makes use of the video media in a bid to document reality “close up” in ‘amateur’ style, without special technological tools or aestheticising effects, often with the hidden agenda of clearly marking a categorical difference between the video and film media, contemporary art and the film industry. On the contrary, Just consciously plays on the idea of video art as a construct that can verge on the real through the invention of fictions and the picturing of other worlds.

Just has exhibited several times in and outside Denmark. I the years to come Just’s works are being showed at; Midway Contemporary Art in St. Paul, Maze Gallery in Torino, The Power Plant in Toronto, Herning Art Museum in Denmark etc. Jesper Just is furthermore represented in several museums and private collections in Europe and North America.