Nemo Jantzen

New Blue, 2020

Photographs, glass, and resin on wood
47 x 50 in.

The first work on your left as you walk into the lobby reads as a portrait of a woman basking in the sun. Step closer and she breaks into hundreds of glass and resin spheres, each a small domed lens magnifying a single photograph. Originally from the Netherlands, artist Nemo Jantzen has lived and worked in New York, Bali and Barcelona, and it shows in these preserved images. Jantzen collects thousands of them (a palm tree, a city skyline, a Coca-Cola cap, a stray word of shop signage), sets each under glass, and arranges them by color until the whole field resolves into a face: warm reds and ambers for the body, deep blues for the sky around her. They look like other people’s vacations, caught and kept. One of the first pieces of art you encounter when you step inside Surf & Sand’s doors, New Blue asks, what new memories will you take home from this trip?