"Roy Rules. It would be a 24/7 96" (Artist Post #4)

Simen Johan creates a situation in his photography that forces the audience to implicate and use their own experiences as a way of getting into what the piece really means. The first piece that I viewed of Johan’s work was entitled “#96”. I think the anonymity of the piece adds to the artist’s intention of leaving interpretation up to that of the viewer. Usually artist name their artwork, whether it be for symbolic or simply categorization purposes. Johan, however, refuses to do so, and therefore creates only a picture which we must decipher.
Number 96 shows a disorderly un-kept while girl with a bag over her head and an arrow in her left hand. In front of her lies, what seems to me, a bald eagle. She is surrounded by walls that were once white but now remain beaten, scratched and graffitied with monsters and other whimsical characters, along with numbers written backwards. To me, personally, the artwork symbolizes the death of the innocence and purity of a nation, preferably the United States because of the implications that a bald eagle holds as our national bird. The dirtied girl with a bag over her head seems to beg for sympathy and help, as she seems to wither away. The girl can also be seen as responsible for the nation’s death, mostly because of the arrow in her hand, yet she seems blind because of the bag, and helpless because of the daunting walls of horror that surround, entrap and somehow torment her.
Through his photography, Simen Johan questions his viewers and creates “narrative possibilities and allegories that appear vaguely familiar and produce numerous associations” (Johan). Johan further states that it is his hope to “to seduce viewers into letting their experience, imagination, and understanding of existing popular narratives create their own interpretations of my images.” I love the mystifying effect that it creates in and of itself.

"Number 96"