Lonneke van der Palen - Lemons Gazing at Mount Etna, 2024

Published in 2024
Collection of posters, comes in a plastic folder
Concept: Lonneke van der Palen, Myrabelle Charlebois, Our Polite Society
Graphic design: Our Polite Society 
Format: 275 × 390 mm
Number of pages: 280
Languages: English
Printing: Gutenberg Beuys Feindruckerei, Germany
ISBN: 978-9-08322-744-3

Four covers available. Randomly attributed.

At once a portable exhibition and a living archive, Lemons Gazing at Mount Etna brings together Lonneke van der Palen’s visual investigations. Premised upon the vernacular of the everyday, Van der Palen’s magnification of details transforms found objects—such as a plastic chair or stray shopping bag—into the protagonists of material culture.

"My artistic practice unfolds as an ever-growing visual investigation centered on one overarching theme: material culture and its preserved, unexpected aesthetic beauty. In my work, I am driven by a fascination with mundane scenes, rituals, modern artefacts, trash, treasures and objects, and their complex relationships with economic, cultural and historical contexts. I respond to existing spaces through carefully crafted compositions in which form, color and light deliberately relate to each other. During this process, I magnify subjects and reduce images to their pure essence, resulting in both visible and subtle shifts in everyday life.
Over the past few years, without any hierarchy, I have accumulated an extensive collection of photographs. Subjects range from plastic chairs, tablecloths, stray shopping bags, and jerry cans to rocks, tent cloths, exotic fruit, and boys in swimming trunks. Both in the studio and on location, my search is driven by a new way of perceiving and discovering unexpected visual pleasures, an overall sense of wonder, and the ability to view and capture everything with equal interest and attention. These found objects, their uses and meanings, are then revealed and communicated to the viewer through vivid images highlighting ephemeral details. The banal takes on an almost exalted status, as billboards for everyday scenes. Although pleasure is at the core, my strategy of revealing hidden beauty and unnoticed aesthetic values is accompanied by underlying notions of consumerism, natural resources, exploitation, and the origin and fabrication of objects."
Lonneke van der Palen