Simen Johan’s Wildlife Illusions

The photographer Simen Johan gained notoriety in the nineteen-nineties for his creepy images of adolescents—doll-faced children and child-faced adults whose likenesses Johan stitched together using an unusual combination of darkroom techniques and early digital manipulation. For the images in his ongoing project “Until the Kingdom Comes,” begun in the mid-aughts, he again made use of subtle digital manipulations, this time to push familiar wildlife imagery into the realm of the not quite real. The most recent images in the series, which will go on display at Yossi Milo Gallery on May 26th, include a group of sea lions caught between blackness and sunlight, appearing as ghostly forms sinking into the sea. A zebra photographed at the San Diego Zoo and placed in front of foliage from Florida and Bali appears to blend into its incongruous surroundings. These composite images are hyperrealistic in their textures and colors, and in the captivating intensity of the animals on display. Yet they work like visual snags, holding our eye as we try to adjust to their destabilizing shifts in logic. Camouflage “appeals to me because it’s nature’s way of confusing the things we see,” Johan says. “We tend to look to nature for authenticity, but even here we encounter illusion.”