Welcome to JCVA

Selected Works

You & I

A voice and sheer-curtain installation set the stage of the gallery interior. The curtains divide the room, turning it into a labyrinth. While wandering through the path demarcated by the curtains, the visitor hears murmured bits of a lovers' conversation. Seen from a bird's-eye view, from a deck higher up in the gallery, the undulating installation reveals itself as a pathway carved by the words: You & I.
The work is chimerical. The curtains create an ambivalent impression: at times they suggest a skin-like membrane, and at others dividers or barriers. The evocative sound track plays an important role, cajoling the visitor to search for its source. The piece seems to speak of a relationship between lovers, but can concurrently reflect a never-to-be realized encounter between any two people, as well as the relationship between artist and audience. It thus operates at several levels of meaning but remains appealingly open-ended.

Rain, Sugar and Eye

The trilogy Rain, Sugar and Eye, whose subjects are each filmed with one long single shot, crystallizes its three subjects down to their essence. The camera reaches into the central objects -- a raindrop, a mound of sugar, an eye -- using intimate and aesthetic framing and zooming in on them so thoroughly it seems almost to enter them.

Karhof uses models whose presence generates a dialogue with the subject and creates a kind of a fantasy microcosm. The subject matter initially offers a mirror to the world, a distorted panoramic view of the surrounding. At the same time, these microcosms feel like the artist's own enclosed, private worlds.

In Rain, a female figure played by Karhof sits in a car while looking at rain drops on the windshield. She gazes at the water droplets, symbolically merging with nature; the visual game confuses interior and exterior, creating the very effect that is obviously the figure's condition.

In Sugar, Karhof holds a mound of sugar in the palm of her hand. Behind her, a framed mountain view offers a suggestive visual parallel to the little hill of sugar she is cupping. Karhof blows smoke on the mountain of sugar; smoke which is later shown to be coming from a cigarette. Slowly, the camera closes in on the pile. The framed mountain-scape view, whose shape echoes that of the sugar pile, bestows on the pile the impression of a mini-landscape: a snow-capped mountain surrounded by clouds.

The last film in the trilogy, Eye, was rated by Dutch Film Magazine one of the top five best films in 2006. Like Rain and Sugar, Eye is filmed using a zoom-in shot that comes closer and closer to the central detail in the frame.

Eye describes a close relationship between two people, a male and a female who are looking into one another's eyes. They are reflected one in the other's eyes and presumably this seeing into one another is mysteriously curative. This mutual gazing enacts the romantic ideal wherein a man and a woman unite with each other while in fact catching a reflection of themselves in the other's eye. The film takes us as far as we can visually go into the lover's eye, and leaves an open question as to what, in fact, can possibly be seen there -- by the lover, or by ourselves.