Context

Giovanni Jance’s untitled installation at FOYER-LA situates itself within a field of structuralist binaries—light and dark, presence and absence, material and immaterial. Across nineteen photographs made between 1999 and the present, Jance stages a slow descent into opacity: luminous skies give way to shadowed atmospheres until crows emerge as figures on the edge of perception, their forms nearly dissolving into void.

The crows here are not incidental subjects but mediating agents, occupying thresholds between the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible, the conscious and its shadow. Their role is to mark instability within systems of meaning, aligning with structuralist recognition that oppositions—life/death, form/void—do not resolve but remain in constant relation.

Jance’s persistence in working with digital cameras over decades of rapid obsolescence underscores this logic. Each image becomes an act of postponement: suspended between the promise of preservation and the inevitability of decay. This echoes conceptual precedents such as Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit (1971), where the body is simultaneously present and dissolving, material yet vanishing into consciousness. Like Piper, Jance treats the medium not as a vessel of permanence but as a conduit into alternative states of being.

Rather than closing off experience, this installation proposes an atmospheric continuum where boundaries between worlds—life and death, matter and spirit—remain porous. The crows, as structural mediators, mark the fragile conditions in which photography becomes less a document of reality than a structuring of passage, a diagram of thresholds where perception itself falters and reconstitutes.

Since the nineteenth century, practitioners of parapsychology have tried to materialize the immaterial through the photographic medium. In this installation, capturing the ineffable through technological processes is a subtle act, but no less resonant. While Jance’s photographs do not depict a singular afterlife with any metaphysical certainty, they offer a terrain where the seen and unseen can converge, where clouds and crows mark the slow drift between form and spirit.

The series Swipe, a triptych of triptychs situates itself at the intersection of structuralist inquiry and contemporary digital culture. The title invokes the ubiquitous gesture of swiping—a finger moved across a touchscreen to navigate images, apps, and timelines. In Jance’s hands, this action becomes metaphorical: not merely a movement across screens, but across temporal and spatial registers, across the fragile thresholds where perception encounters flux.

A wall of promotional posters, torn and layered through intervention, transforms into abstraction. What was once surface-level advertising becomes a temporal palimpsest, exposing fragments of commercial imagery alongside gestural voids. Here, presence/absence and commerce/abstraction coexist. Like a digital swipe revealing partial traces of what came before, the billboard gestures toward the instability of signifiers, inviting the viewer to navigate remnants of the recent past as if scrolling through layers of collective memory.

Fruit trees under translucent nets oscillate between protection and concealment. The mesh intervenes as both safeguard and veil, situating the orchard in a liminal state: ripening/withholding, exposure/concealment, nature/culture. The folds of mesh recall veils, or even pixels stretched thin, suggesting that human intervention mediates not only agricultural cycles but also our perception of natural systems. This swiping across views registers time not linearly, but relationally—each repetition altering how the landscape is read.

A stone on the shoreline is repeatedly covered and revealed by sea foam. This modest gesture stages flux/stasis, appearance/disappearance, ephemeral/perpetual. Unlike the hourglass that funnels sand through a narrow aperture, Jance flattens time: grains dispersed, washed, and recomposed by the tide. The swipe here is the ocean itself, brushing across the image-plane, alternately concealing and disclosing.

Together, the three triptychs enact a structuralist logic of repetition and difference, aligning with conceptual precedents while situating themselves in the vernacular of our era. The act of swiping links ancient concerns of time and perception with the immediacy of digital culture: the bodily gesture by which we traverse screens becomes the structuring metaphor for traversing layered systems of representation. In this sense, Swipe belongs to Jance’s ongoing oeuvre of works—such as 18 rpm or the crow installation—that explore how photography mediates the incomprehensible rules of “relatable time.”

On Valentine’s Day 1999, Giovanni Jance initiated an open-ended video interview with Sumi Kozawa, proprietor of Tokio Florist in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Filmed within her shop and home, the project began as an inquiry into the temporal registers embedded in everyday labor—particularly the cultivation and sale of Papaver nudicaule (Icelandic poppies), whose fleeting vitality mirrors the ephemerality of ritual exchange.

The work has since expanded into a layered meditation on time, memory, and continuity. The original interview is spliced with still-life photographs made two decades later—after Sumi Kozawa’s passing—depicting halted clocks, framed family portraits, and unsold inventory. These images transform remnants of domestic and commercial life into structural signifiers of suspended time, aligning with conceptual practices that privilege duration, decay, and the everyday over spectacle.

Intercut with this footage is video of Susie Kozawa, Sumi’s daughter, performing on improvised instruments fashioned from household objects. Filmed with the same low-resolution digital camera used in 1999, her performances collapse temporal distance: past and present converge, echoing the persistent sonic and visual cacophony of the Kozawa household.

Jance positions the Kozawa archive as both document and system. Rather than closing on biography, the work constructs a relational field where media, memory, and materiality intersect, situating the everyday gestures of a florist’s life within broader inquiries into how time is seen, heard, and preserved.

Giovanni Jance frequently initiates projects by contacting the officials or agencies responsible for the sites he seeks to examine. In this instance, he communicated with Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, before traveling to Lesvos. Initially joining a night-time surveillance mission between Lesvos and Turkey, Jance chose instead to charter a boat, shifting the perspective from that of border enforcement to that of arrival. His voyage paralleled the course of refugees crossing the Aegean, tracing a shoreline that had become a contested threshold between nations, identities, and lived realities.

In July 2016, visited Skala Sikamineas to photograph a life-jacket disposal site and beaches earlier documented by Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev, and Tyler Hicks of The New York Times in their Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage. By re-engaging these locations, Jance underscored the brevity of collective memory in an age where images, produced and circulated in near-infinite volume, are quickly absorbed and forgotten within the digital stream.

At the life-jacket disposal site, thousands of fluorescent vests form a somber monument to displacement. Photographed individually, they read as fragile proxies for the absent bodies they once held; photographed in mass, they recall aerial images of burial grounds. Installed floor-to-ceiling in a grid, these images flatten catastrophe into a monochrome field, staging the tension between remembrance and erasure.

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Along the shoreline, Jance’s photographs from the vantage of the sea invert the traditional gaze. Rather than documenting refugees from the position of host, his images align with the embodied perspective of those approaching land, outsiders entering an uncertain terrain. This choice resonates with his broader practice of positioning himself at the periphery of dominant systems, a form of self-imposed exile that mirrors the dislocation central to the subject itself.

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As an immigrant himself, though having arrived in Los Angeles early in life, Jance often reflects on the condition of the wanderer, the fly on the wall.  His images from Lesvos extend beyond documentation to embody this vantage, aligning the act of looking with the disorientation of displacement. Not unlike the wanderings of the Odyssey, but without the promise of return, the work situates itself in a state of perpetual transit, home always deferred, identity always shifting. In this sense, 10.5 kilometers from the Pulitzer Prize becomes less a record of borders than a meditation on estrangement, exile, and the ongoing search for belonging.

The helicopter has long served as an emblematic presence in the Los Angeles landscape; at once a seer of newsworthy spectacle, as in the O.J. Simpson pursuit, and a searchlight that pierces the city’s nocturnal opacity, illuminating backyards and alleyways. Between 2015 and 2017, Giovanni Jance chartered helicopters each spring to document the annual bloom of Jacaranda trees across Los Angeles County, reframing the aircraft from instrument of surveillance to instrument of aesthetic inquiry.

The Jacaranda, now synonymous with Southern California’s spring landscape, was introduced to the region in the early 20th century by horticulturalist Katherine Olivia Sessions (1857–1940). Often referred to as the “Mother of Balboa Park,” Sessions played a decisive role in shaping the region’s visual ecology by importing and naturalizing non-native species. The purple canopy she helped establish persists as both civic adornment and botanical reminder of Los Angeles’ long history of engineered landscapes.

Jance’s photographs focus on Jacarandas planted in medians, sidewalks, and residual parcels managed by the Department of Public Works. In installation, geographically distant streets are reassembled into a continuous field of purple bloom.  A multi-planed landscape that dissolves municipal boundaries.

The project further embellishes  systems of urban planning, state authority, and the incidental beauty produced through bureaucratic landscaping. The adjoining driveways, parked cars, and private yards visible in each frame serve as markers of social stratification, situating the trees within a matrix of lived conditions. By shifting the helicopter’s gaze from spectacle to flowering, Jance transforms a vehicle of authority into a means of mapping urban space, rendering visible the structural relations—public/private, natural/engineered, spectacle/banality—that shape the city’s ecology.

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For the second installment of Tekhelet, Giovanni Jance presents a 25 minute single channel video produced in Israel the previous year.  This video starts with an image of the seascape surrounding current day Tel Dor, in northern Israel.  It is in this region where until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the intensely secret manufacture of indigo made from the glands of Murex Trunculus contributed to the flourishing dye industry central to the economies around the Agean and Mediterranean seas.  

Though Tekhelet, a Hebrew word used to describe a biblical blue remained part of the lexicon, the process by which the color was to be made had been undecipherable in Talmudic passages.  Then, in 1988, the color was once again reproduced as it had been done by the Phoenicians.

As the video progresses, Jance quickly takes the viewer from Tel Dor, to the disputed territories of the West Bank, in Kfar Adumim where, in a small two-room shop, Tekhelet is once again produced for the purpose of dyeing strands of wool, then knotted together to make  Tzittzit, a ritualistic tassel worn by observant Jews.

Here, the artist relishes in strictly observing without the benefit of a translation, as this recently resurrected carries with it, a weighty historic trace.  Embracing the lapse of time between the archeological vats on the shores of Tel Dor to the modern day makeshift laboratory in the Judean Desert.