Finn Jubak

Finn Jubak is a New York-based artist whose practice explores the ambiguity between organic and staged instances. In both cases, he is interested in capturing the drama, humor, and beauty of objects and landscapes in momentary compositions. He recently earned a Bachelor of Arts from the Univeristy of Chicago, where his research centered on contemporary documentary practices in Latin America. He was a 2018 recipient of the UChicago Fine Art Fund, for which he created a self-published newspaper exploring the history and legacy of Doc Films, UChicago’s film society and the oldest student film group in the country. Although Jubak is primarily focused in photography, his interest in image-making more broadly leads him to explore video and sculpture as well.

Sunset

The golden hour. That’s when you’re supposed to shoot, or at least it’s when a lot of people do. Things are more beautiful then. Driving around with the friends and family who hosted me in California, I certainly felt this way, and took pictures as the sun got low, feeling as though I was doing something classically “right.”

It’s often said (at least by some) that the photograph’s gestural nature, its ability (perhaps proclivity) to point at things, to signal them out, is a kind of distraction—that the photograph can and perhaps should do something more complex than merely point. I am, however, still interested in this gesture—the “look at this!” quality of the choice of subject matter, framing, the imagined outstretched index finger. The performativity of this move is what I find compelling, the possibility that although the photograph can be “of” a thing that may seem circumscribed, this can be unsettled in various ways. But it’s also wrong, somehow. So I was doing some things right and some things wrong. One of the images in this series, a dying tree that remained somehow alive in a friend’s backyard, limbs severed, represents this way of looking: some things attended to, and some things left uncared for.

Sunset. A time, and a feeling, but also a place-the name of a road I had never been to, but for some reason kept thinking of.

To view more of Finn Jubak’s work please visit his website.