Street Cast (2024), photos made in collaboration with photographer David Johnson, flatbed print on glass, cast concrete.
“With a background in architecture, Johan Bech Jespersen considers how spatial constructs and images code and choreograph our movements, relations, and collective desires. Using sculpture, video, performance and print, his work explores power relationships within real space and within the staged spaces of image production, and elaborates the role of fiction and fantasy in the production of sexuality and social behaviors”
Bech Jespersen’s Street cast merges the two associations of its title: Casting non professionals in public space as the subjects of the photographs, and literally casting in the street.
The models in the triptych of over-sized photographs are uniformed laborers who work in urban space, and whose occupation is tied to their bodies and the built environment. Bech Jespersen understands this visible labor as also an embodied performance subjected to the public gaze; an erotic spectacle of the body at work, where individuals are transformed into objects of desire and archetypes of masculinity.Elaborating how the idealized male laboring body – complete with uniforms and props – is a dominant trope in sexual entertainment, Bech Jespersen invited the street casted workers for a photoshoot with the erotic photographer David Johnson, whose past vocation as a male stripper provides a nuanced take on the performativity of work. With nods to the conventions seen in classical erotica’s representation in pop culture, Johnson’s work crystallizes the idea of erotica as fiction and abstraction, rendering quotidian human relations and toil into forms of seduction.
The resulting collaborative works have been printed on large sheets of glass that mimic the smooth surfaces of the modern cityscape (at once transparent and hyper-reflective), and recall the facades of strip clubs and store fronts. In front of the photographs, Bech Jespersen has placed casts from the cityscape, transforming the exhibition into a street and stage for the performers in the images. a threshold that demarcates certain forms of activity, presentation and movement – a liminal bridge between the public and the private.
Conflating theater, striptease, and the street, Bech Jespersen calls attention to how all architecture is a choreographing of the body, a site for performativity that sets a scene and influences the actions of its occupants. Architecture depends on the human body for its proportions, while the body in turn finds and understands itself through architecture. Street Cast exposes the eroticism of this relationship, as well as the erotics of labor itself, by investigating how masculine sexuality, seduction and desire are coded within our urban environment.” – Mathew Post
Photographs by David johnson, choreographer Camilla Lind, Producer Bjarke Gunslev Due,
Models: Christian, Lorenzo, and Jacob
Contacats
Mail: johanbechjespersen@gmail.com
instagram: therealjohanbechjespersen
