CITYSCAPES
BY JACQUIE MARIA WESSELS
In Paramaribo, the main city of Suriname, Jacquie Maria Wessels photographed city scenes, dominated by the typically Surinamese wall paintings: hand-painted advertisements containing hyper-realistic depictions of tools, soup cans, oatmeal, hot dogs and other products, along with exhortations like 'Do your best in school'... This carefully composed photo series is both alienating and surrealistic and gives the viewer in a playful way a glimpse into the Surinamese culture and daily life.
The analogue photographed series 'Cityscapes' is published in the Photo Book 'Cityscapes + Birdmen' by Voetnoot publishers.
About the author
Jacquie Maria Wessels was born in Vlaardingen, the Netherlands, and presently lives and works in Amsterdam. She graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in photography in 1990, and studied social psychology at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam. Wessels has developed into an autonomous/documentary photographer who prefers to delve deeply into a subject over a long period. She travels all over the world to discover new surroundings. Her subjects often serve as a framework for investigating the diverse social situations in which people find themselves.
The work of Wessels has been exhibited at various locations in the Netherlands and abroad including, Photography and Visual Arts Festival Encontros da Imagem in Braga (PT), the Surinaams Museum in Paramaribo (SR), Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen (NL), Museum IJsselstein (NL), Museum of Photography Thessaloniki (GR), PhotoBiennale Greece (GR), Noorderlicht Photo Festival in Groningen (NL), New York Photo Festival (US), Gallery Carte Blanche San Francisco (US), Naarden Photo Festival (NL), Corcoran Gallery Washington (US), Gallery Cultural Speech Amsterdam (NL), Galerie Baudelaire Antwerp (BE), Municipal Museum Arnhem (NL), Amsterdam Municipal Archive (NL), the Historical Museum in Amsterdam (NL) and diverse (inter)national Art Fairs.
Website: https://www.jacquiemariawessels.nl/portfolio.html