Puzzling memories the story
In commemoration of 9/11
puzzling memories
In 1998 Jurriaan Molenaar won the Dutch Wim Izaks-prize and sold all his paintings at the including show at the Mondriaan House. This succes was his reason to move to New York in 1999.
His fascination for architecture and perspective got a complete new impulse by experiencing the enormous sizes of the streets and skyscrapers, the Twin Towers in particular. Also his love for minimal architecture made The Twin Towers his favorite site to visit, almost daily. In The Netherlands he was used to be able to see a building at once, but standing next to the Twin Towers, he had to move his head consciously up and down. To save this experience of movement and changing perspectives, he took many analogue photographs of bits and pieces of his view, while moving his head. This resulted in an enormous amount of photos to cover one building.
In his studio he made collages of these photos, to capture the movement of changing perspectives in one image. Staying in New York for two years, until april 2001, he took over 3000 pictures, including 350 of the Twin Towers.
THE CHANGE OF 9/11
The North tower of the Twin Towers housed a creative studio for around 20 artists, at the upper floors. At the beginning of 2001, Jurriaan Molenaar inscribed for this studio. But there was a waiting list of almost a year. While he was waiting to be welcomed, the world’s most unexpected moment was about to take place.
The 9/11 attack took place on the World Trade Center and has gone down in history as one of the most life-changing moments in decades.
RESET and
RESTART
The attack, the personal friendship with his secretaresse (she died in the attack) and the fact that he himself most probably had been there right on 9-11, made him decide to stop immediately with his plans to work on all the images he had.
The finished ones, including the biggest one of the Twin Towers, he threw away...
The box with all the negatives went to a storage and was never looked at since.
After 19 years, the hidden box appeared by chance and Molenaar sent on 9-11-2020 a recovered collage of one of the Twin Towers to his friend, the former Dutch cultural aTaché in New York, Jan Kennis.
The same day Jan Kennis forwarded the picture to Mark Schaming, director of the New York State Museum (Albany). Schaming is enthusiastic and asks for Molenaars portfolio.
Jan Kennis subsequently asked Jurriaan Molenaar if he would be willing to unpack the rest of the entire box and if he would be able to continue to work on the project he never finished or showed before. He did, and this is how the project restarted after 19 years, that Molenaar gave the title ‘Puzzling Memories’.
2020-2021
In October 2020 Molenaar starts to inventorise the box. The photos that already were used in 2000 are no longer available and have to be reprinted. Since all the photos were taken of small details of many buildings and no longer in order, he has to find out which ones belong together. With 3000 images to look at, this process takes 4 weeks.
The next challenge is to see if the artist can step back into the focus he had twenty years before and work on the same material so many years later. As soon as he starts digging in the box, the memories and intentions return immediately.
His goal was, and currently still is, to turn the rectangular buildings into curved and solemn identities.
Because of the corona crisis, the New York State Museum is closed and Molenaar doesn’t know if the museum will be interested in works on the Twin Towers only or will be interested in a broader view. He starts working on the entire material, for 5 months.
One of the series of photos has a plane, flying to the world. What to do with an image that originally was innocent, but truly symbolic after 9-11? This piece is one of the examples why he stopped working on this project after 2001...
He decides to make this piece the way it was originally ment to be.
The biggest collage of the Twin Towers that had been thrown away immediately after the attack, he remakes as well.
Thereafter Molenaar continues realizing collages with the reprinted analogue photos from 2000 and has the results digitally scanned, so they can eventually be printed on different sizes.
During the proces, he notices an interesting difference in the available material. His choice for minimal architecture is consistent, but a lot of the photos were taken on bright and sunny days with deep blue skies. And quite a few were taken on miserable days, afterwards, on purpose. Of exactly the same buildings. The palette of these second series are ‘silencing the images’, according to Molenaar. Although he took these grayish photos twenty years ago, they are surprisingly close and predicting the palette and appearance of Molenaars nowadays artworks.
Fifteen final examples of the project Puzzling Memories, realized in 2021 with Jurriaan Molenaars analogue photographs from 2000.
In the 9/11 commemoration year, the New York State Museum achieves and receives the original collage where this entire project started with; New York 2000 #1.
In 2021 Jurriaan will be giving an exhibition in the MoMa Moscow.