About

The wild life

Jimmy Dovholt (°1969, Köping, Sweden) is an artist who mainly works with photography. By manipulating the viewer to create confusion, Dovholt makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing.

His photos isolate the movements of humans and/or objects. By doing so, new sequences are created which reveal an inseparable relationship between motion and sound. With a subtle minimalistic approach, his works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.

His works are often about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water), space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes developed in absurd ways. By parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, he finds that movement reveals an inherent awkwardness, a humour that echoes our own vulnerabilities. The artist also considers movement as a metaphor for the ever-seeking man who experiences a continuous loss.

His works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, he focuses on the idea of ‘public space’ and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting.

His practice provides a useful set of allegorical tools for manoeuvring with a pseudo-minimalist approach in the world of photography: these meticulously planned works resound and resonate with images culled from the fantastical realm of imagination. By questioning the concept of movement, he often creates several practically identical works, upon which thoughts that have apparently just been developed are manifested: notes are made and then crossed out again, ‘mistakes’ are repeated.

His works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image. By emphasising aesthetics, he seduces the viewer into a world of ongoing equilibrium and the interval that articulates the stream of daily events. Moments are depicted that only exist to punctuate the human drama in order to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in everyday life.

His works sometimes radiate a cold and latent violence. At times, disconcerting beauty emerges. The inherent visual seductiveness, along with the conciseness of the exhibitions, further complicates the reception of their manifold layers of meaning. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, he creates work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude towards conceptual and minimal art can be found. The work is aloof and systematic and a cool and neutral imagery is used.

His works are on the one hand touchingly beautiful, on the other hand painfully attractive. Again and again, the artist leaves us orphaned with a mix of conflicting feelings and thoughts. Jimmy Dovholt currently lives and works in Stockholm.

Just kidding – I just like to take pictures. (But if you liked the “artist biography” above, please go and grab one for yourself as well.

Articles, features and other kind of buzz 

• Smashing Magazine (2008)
• Eric Kim Street Photography. (2010)
• Street Photographer Blog (2011)
• Top Photography Films (2013)
• Daniel Carlbom Street Photography (2013)
• Urban Picnic Street Photography (2014)

Exhibitions

• 2012 Gnesta Planket (mixed photographers)
• 2013 Gnesta Planket (mixed photographers)
• 2014 Fotografiska (mixed street photographers)
• 2014 Gnesta planket (mixed photographers)
• 2014 Kaffeverket (mixed street photographers)
• 2014 Oxelblom (With Ola Billmont & Brian Sparks)
• 2014 Single exhibition at the Pocket Size album release concert
• 2014 Urban Picnic Gallery, Saffron Walden, Essex UK (As one of the finalist photographer)
• 2015 Gnesta planket (mixed photographers)

Competitions

• Urban Picnic Street Photography Competition 2014 – finalist
• 2015 PND & Acuity Press Street Photography 2015 Competition curated by Colin Westerbeck – winner.

 Other mentions

• 2014 Interviewed by radio at Gnesta Planket
• 2014 Candid Frame “Seeing graphically“
• 2014 Candid Frame “Creating depth“
• 2014 Art Photo Feature Magazine Flickr group, curator and photo reviewer
• 2015 Full Frontal Flash collective member
• 2015 Street hunters: Shortlisted on “The 20 most influential Street Photographers of 2015″
• 2015 Street Mojo: “The best current Street Photographers for inspiration vol 2“