KUHN, Mona (San Paolo, 1969)She Disappeared into Complete Silence

Book Design: Mona Kuhn, Duncan Whyte, Gerhard Steidl

Acclaimed for her contemporary and intimate depictions of the nude, Kuhn takes a new direction towards abstraction in her latest series, She Disappeared into Complete Silence. In a golden modernist structure on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, architectural lines, light reflections and a single figure are carefully photographed against the backdrop of the Californian desert.
The human figure—her friend and collaborator Jacintha—emerges as a surrealist mirage, fragmented and indistinct, sometimes submerged in shadows or overexposed. The glass and mirror façade of the building serves as an optical plane, an extension of the artist's camera and lens. Light splits into refracting colours, desert vegetation grows sideways, inside is outside and outside is inside. Kuhn produces a certain disorienting effect by introducing metal sheets as a kind of additional surface, sometimes producing purely abstract results. She Disappeared into Complete Silence marks Kuhn's increasing use of techniques that seem to unite figure, abstraction and landscape.