“I rarely present landscapes as they appear, because we never truly remember them as they were.”
Joost Vandebrug
The fragmentary and unstable nature of memory lies at the heart of Joost Vandebrug’s practice. “Time alters what we see and how we hold it,” he says. By breaking landscapes into parts and reconstructing them, combining subtle shifts in distance and viewpoint with fragments gathered across different places and moments, he seeks a visual approximation of the way memory functions.
Material research and experimentation are central to the creation of each piece. Working with ultra-thin handmade washi, photographic emulsions, thermoformed acrylic, resin and metals, Vandebrug allows the image and physical form to shape one another. The resulting imperfections thereby expose the mechanics of the process and reinforce the idea of fragmentation and unstable memory. Each piece is unique.
Vandebrug studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and worked as a commercial photographer and filmmaker before dedicating himself fully to his artistic practice. His documentary film Bruce Lee and the Outlaw received awards and critical acclaim. He has exhibited widely, including at Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam and FOMU, Antwerp, Belgium.