Muddy Dance

Kessels, Erik

Portrait taken from the website of Mois de la Photo in Montréal : " As an exhibition curator, editor, collector, graphic designer, advertising manager, and artist, Erik Kessels exemplifies the versatile creator of the digital age who engages in the full range of creative activities. Kessels pays close attention to the popular and trivial forms of photography (family albums, commercial documentation, pornography ads, etc.) which would normally be rejected by canon-defining museums and institutions. Kessels sifts and recycles cast-off materials, like a waste-picker in search of overlooked treasures. The photographs thus recovered, displaced from their original function in a Duchampian gesture, reveal, through their new mise en valeur, an unexpected aesthetic and programmatic background that points toward an ecology of the image. " Among his photobooks, one of the most famous project is "In Almost Every Picture", a series of publications each with a unique subject, self-published through KesselKramer: issue number 17 was published in 2021. Also, Erik Kessels is engaged in a long-term collaboration with French publisher RVB Books : "Album Beauty" (2012), "Mother Nature" (2014), "Unfinished Father" (2015), "Shit" (2018) and "Muddy Dance" (2021).