In her previous series, Situations, Laurel Johannesson depicted the tension between the body and uncanny landscapes. Vast terrains and arcane atmospheres became active forces, engulfing the bodies within them as they were absorbed by their surroundings, suspended in moments where environment overtook identity. These works considered the immensity of the external world and our fragile orientation within it.

 

Laurel’s photographic series, Thresholds, emerges from a different vantage point, one shaped intimately by her recent experimental film. As she layered images and explored slowed gestures and shifting temporalities, the film became both a conceptual impetus and a visual reservoir for the photographs that followed. The film’s imagery hovered between abstraction and embodiment and introduced a visual language of drifting vision, soft ruptures, and suspended states of perception. These sensibilities carry into the new photographs, which approach the world not as a stable scene but as a fluid experience unfolding at the edges of recognition.

 

Expansive vistas are replaced by close, dreamlike fragments in which colour and form dissolve into one another, offering an exploration of embodiment and interiority. Grain, shadow, and texture become central to the image with distortions and irregularities —small visual glitches— appearing throughout the images as an interruption of the surface. These moments echo the film’s embrace of uncertainty and temporal slippage. In addition, Johannesson’s use of a modern replica of an early 19th-century lens with its unusual aberrations recalls the film’s experimental approach.

 

Both the photographs and the film that influenced them inhabit spaces where clarity dissolves, where gestures blur into traces, and where the real and the imagined drift toward one another.