About the artist
* 1992 in Bielefeld, Germany
Lives and works in Montréal, Canada
Dahlhoff is a pluri-disciplinary artist. Her work includes collages, prints, photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, and documentary.
She studied at the University of Paderborn and l’École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux and graduated in 2019. She has a Masters degree in French, Education and Fine-Arts.
“Most of my work is based on photography which I transform into sculptural collages on plasterboard and then taken back to the medium of departure – a photography.”
Joana is interested in the term ‘border’ such as borders between artistic techniques and borders between art and architecture. But above all, her work deals with the observation, reflection and investigation of architectural structures and their transformation through the camera.
What happens if a house is decontextualized into the pictorial space? Deconstructed into its visible parts? How does everyday use behave as an artistic medium?
Does the viewer draw references to the familiar use or does the medium become a detached and independent work of art through techniques and strategies of image-finding?
Does the artist become an architect of pictorial space when he depicts architectural elements and rearranges them in an isolated way on a two-dimensional image carrier?
Does the pictorial space itself becomes a construction site?
With her works she tries to give a presence back to the familiar, everyday, often unnoticed or seemingly banal things, to emphasize and represent qualities in order to open up a hidden view of the object.
“The wide and vague conception of my artwork can make it possible to question our own viewing habits with regard to our architectural environment and our experienced values.”
Joana questions the proportions, the materiality and, repeatedly, the use and users of the living
space, without providing a direct answer or solution. Rather, the works act together in the sense of a collection: to show possibilities and perspectives without claiming completeness.
One should be able to decide individually what is ugly and what is beautiful, what is
acceptable and what is not. The viewer won’t find classical definitions, prefabricated
views or solutions in her works. The artists intention is always to encourage other people to trust their eyes and to see what they need to see and to feel what they need to feel.
In her recent sophisticated and thought provoking works she shows a dynamic exchange between paint and paper as main mediums. Thus the medium changes compared to earlier works, thematically she still researches construction through deconstruction and in some works we can see intertextual references.
