Jannemarein Renout NL, b. 1969

Visual artist Jannemarein Renout challenges the medium of photography by creating her own devices. She invented a technique of generating photographic images with altered flatbed scanners – from which its light source is switched off – and therefore reacts to daylight. This technique has been contributed as a ‘renograph’ in FOAM Magazine #49 – following Man Ray’s photogrammic rayograph.

In her on-going project, SCAN_2400, Jannemarein is concerned with making the invisible visible. Light, motion, and time form the palet for creating her works of art. The renographical device translates daylight into different colors and patterns: visualizations without intention or composition. The constellations take shape independently from the artist’s hand, yet within a very recognizable and authentic style. It is a visual language which origin is outside the realm of meaning. Renout’s ultimate goal is to keep her influence as a maker of the image to a minimum. She grants the medium agency of a sort that questions the artist’s authority.

The work of Jannemarein Renout offers a dialogue between coincidence and influence, revolving around the critical moment in the process of creation: the instance the scan is made. While her early practices are characterized by an interest in the weather’s play with light, she has now added three more methods into her research: consistently scanning at specific moments of the day, the use of multiple scanners at the same time, and the use of different types or brands of scanners. Whereas she started in 2014 with one scanner, she now has an astonishing collection of 38.

The ongoing art project Looking Is Touching shows Jannemarein’s photographic and painterly investigation into her father’s identity. A few years ago her father questioned his identity and captured his search for himself in dozens of photos. The subjects vary from self-portraits and his daily breakfast, lunch and dinner, to objects that he collected over the years. This immense photo archive is an inexhaustible source for both Jannemarein’s quest and that of her father. In addition to the personal images, she shows enlarged short letters and notes that he has written. His incipient dementia becomes visible between the lines.