April 13 - May 18, 2008

Press release

Thrust Projects is pleased to present the New York debut of Jelena Tomasevic's Just Kidding, a single channel video installation with music by composer Vladimir Djurisic. Placed in the mountain landscape of Tomasevic's native Montenegro, Just Kidding is a short film of an 8 minute single take, a narrative of surreal and enigmatic imagery using elements previously seen in her paintings such as a house, swimming pool, girl, and hair dryer.

"In Cinema, the long take is usually a means to explore duration of the time and mimetic potential of the imagery, but in Just Kidding, this stylistic device is used as an allegorical compression; an artificial sublimation of the displacement, i.e. of the human Ex-sistence. Jelena Tomasevic's vision is both melodramatic and ecstatic, functioning as both an anxious description and a serene analysis. Within the strange landscape: a house, a chair, a sliding board, a pool. Enters one person, a girl. She inscribes herself into this topography, this constellation of objects, and we as spectators are suddenly confronted with a hermeneutical enigma, maybe even with suspense - What's going on here, where does all of this lead? The answer lies in mise-en-scene: things have their meaning according to their (architectonic) position in the created symbolic network. As we watch our heroine, the girl, as a developing short story, different aspects are noticed; the sand being a disruptive element, the acknowledgment of the camera in the end, the hair dryer as the sword of Damocles hanging over the girl's head. When she enters the pool, one wonders if it is a blissful or tragic event, but that is Jelena Tomasevic's Just Kidding: a mystery, that acute danger, that fragile beauty of our existential Frisson." Aleksandar Becanovic, 2008.

Just Kidding is Jelena Tomasevic's second solo exhibition at the gallery. Born in Podgorica, Montenegro 1974, she has had solo shows at Artopia, Milan 2007; Buero D.C, Cologne 2007, Galerie Conrads, Düsseldorf 2007, Thrust Projects, New York 2006, and represented Montenegro/Serbia at the 51st Venice Biennial 2005. Recent group exhibitions in 2007 include "Best regards from the blind spot", Sacramento University & Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Bilbao, "Off–Center Femininities", Windows of Kimmel Center, N.Y.U., New York, "Horizon", EFA Gallery, New York.