Artistic practice

In her art works, Julie Lundsteen Boserup creates a new relation between us and our close surroundings. With an acute sense of the aesthetic and social heterogeneity we inhabit, she creates collages that change our experience of tedious everyday impressions. Through her works, we can experience our surroundings anew and wonder at the facades we pass every day and never notice and the ideals we strive towards and yet create in our own personal ways.

For her solo-show Gadeplan (2004), Lundsteen Boserup created a collage of elements from the exhibition space Raca and her own close environment; Vesterbro in Copenhagen. Here was the façade of a burger joint on Vesterbrogade, a sausage stand at Frederiksberg Torv and a naked wall at the striptease bar, Waterloo. Presented on wallpaper made of printed photos of tiles from the same area, the drawings appeared as a reconstruction of the visual and social environment of Vesterbro, which worked both as an estrangement and a new revelation of the unique atmosphere of the area. As the artist explains: “Even though the burger joint and sausage stand are loud visual spectacles in our urban environment, we have stopped noticing them.” Contrarily, the white walls of Waterloo appear completely invisible for us next to their bosoming advertising posters.
The street revelations were drawn in various shapes and techniques, with materials such as pens, felt-tip pens, colour crayons and photocopy print. These materials are, like the topics she draws, readily available and can be used in a hurry, like the digital camera that Lundsteen Boserup always has at hand in her search for artistic subjects. This was also the case with a street in Berlin that, under the title Autostrasse in 2003, was made the subject of a similar investigation of otherwise unnoticed house fronts.
In other words, it is the undetermined and normally overlooked visual presences that catch Lundsteen Boserup’s attention: “A bar with carefully designed ‘wild west saloon’ sign and thick yellow nicotine mist in the windows. Dull posters in a shopping gallery, accidentally arranged so as to make out a pattern according to a logic of colour.” As she expresses it: “The aesthetic face of our social reality is a mosaic of life expressions from people whom we never meet, but who show a fearless and stubborn energy in their different ways of handling reality.”
In other exhibition projects, Lundsteen Boserup has thus focused in particular on the type of insertion ordinary people make in their environment. An example is the work Neighbour (2003), where a house in London, split by different occupants’ interests, became the subject of Lundsteen Boserup’s pen. Or the work Mini Wonderland, created for the exhibition Daydream Nation (2005), where Lundsteen Boserup had made a collage of priced gardens and houses. The work appears, on the one hand, as an expression of our assembly line ideals today, in that we strive for the same ideals. On the other hand, the work shows a celebration of the energy which ordinary people spend on realising their ideals and the personal choices they entrust in them. Lundsteen Boserup had thus redone the creation process of the houses by carefully constructing them from individual parts and in three-dimensional relief. At the same time, through the work’s collage character and its unique blend of black and white and coloured parts, she has made the process appear as a continuation of childhood cut out dolls, what the priced houses and garden of course appear to be; the daydream or castle in the air turned real.

by Ditte Vilstrup Holm, 2005.