Photography: Mona Kuhn

A modernist glass house on the edge of Joshua Tree is the setting for artist Mona Kuhn’s mysterious new series, She Disappeared into Complete Silence, released as a book published by Steidl. The desert terrain of the southeastern Californian national park, known for its Joshua trees and distinctive boulders, has attracted campers, climbers, stargazers and psychedelic lovers for years. It has been the subject and site for numerous works of art, and more recently, a place where artists have bought property for weekend getaways from LA (Ed Ruscha is one them).

乔舒亚树边上的现代主义玻璃房子是艺术家莫娜库恩神秘的新系列的背景，她消失在完全沉默中，作为斯泰德尔出版的一本书发行。加利福尼亚东南部国家公园的沙漠地形，以其约书亚树和独特的巨石而闻名，多年来一直吸引着露营者、登山者、观星者和迷幻爱好者。这里是许多艺术品的主题和场所，最近，艺术家们从洛杉矶购买了一套周末度假的房产(EdRuscha就是其中之一)。

Brazilian-born artist Mona Kuhn, known for her close to life-size nudes, headed out into the wilderness with an old friend, Jacintha, to shoot an experimental project at Robert Stone’s gilded Acido Dorado, built on five acres of high desert. The single story minimalist structure mirrors the golden hues of its surroundings, in turn becoming ‘an extension of my own camera and optics,’ Kuhn explains. ‘These translucent surfaces offered a great setting for reflections and at times worked as a prism for the light.’

巴西出生的艺术家莫娜·库恩(MonaKuhn)，以接近真人大小的裸体而闻名，她和一位老朋友雅辛莎(Jacintha)一起前往荒野，在罗伯特·斯通(RobertStone)镀金的阿西多·多拉多(Acido Dorado)那里拍摄一个实验项目。库恩解释说，这个单层极简主义结构反映了周围环境的金色，反过来又变成了“我自己相机和光学的延伸”。“这些半透明的表面为反射提供了一个很好的环境，有时还充当了光线的棱镜。”

‘I was drawn to the desert because of its magical light and raw mystic landscape,’ she says. The house and its remote location was the ideal stage for experimentation and to ‘push the boundaries of representation’. The artist adds: ‘I wanted to escape the body and photograph the human presence coming in and out of evidence, at times over exposed, at times hidden in shadows, like a desert mirage, a solitary figure who could have been the very first or last.’

她说，我被这片沙漠吸引，是因为它有神奇的光线和原始的神秘景观。这座房子及其偏远的位置是进行实验和“突破表象边界”的理想舞台。这位艺术家补充道：“我想逃离尸体，拍摄人类存在的来龙去脉，有时是暴露的，有时是隐藏在阴影中的，就像沙漠海市蜃楼，一个孤独的人物，可能是第一个也可能是最后一个。”

The series introduces abstraction into Kuhn’s practice for the first time, and moves between the landscape and the figure, navigating between nature and culture, meaning and being. ‘It was important for me to embrace abstraction,’ says the artist. ‘For example, [there is] a sequence of images which is crucial to these works: it goes from a gradual straight image of landscape as the sun goes below the horizon line, to its refracted twilight colours onto the Mylar surface to the same image now stretched onto a large glass panel, where you recognise the landscape and its sunset colourations, but with the ambiguous silhouette of Jacintha. The abstraction of the image itself is what I was looking for.’ Likewise, the suggestive cover, recalling a Lucio Fontana painting, is a simple slit down the middle, ‘as if you would split open the image as you open the book’.

该系列首次将抽象引入库恩的实践中，并在景观与人物之间移动，在自然与文化之间进行导航，意义和意义。“例如，对我来说，拥抱抽象是很重要的，”艺术家说。“例如，有一个对这些作品至关重要的图像序列：当太阳在地平线以下时，它从一个逐渐的直线图像中走出来，将其折射的微光刻在Mylar表面上，使同一图像被拉伸到一块大的玻璃面板上，在那里你识别出风景和日落的颜色，但有Jacintha的模糊轮廓。图像本身的抽象是我在寻找的东西。同样，提示性封面，回忆了LucioFontana绘画，是一个简单的狭缝，“仿佛你将在打开书本时打开图像”。

Timeless and trippy, the photographs are testimony to the unique effects of the desert environment – a place for deep enquiry and to ruminate on the essence of being human. ‘She has unfolding meanings. It refers not just to the single figure, but also the endless horizon lines running into infinity, and the lines rendered from thoughts,’ as Kuhn puts it. §

这些照片是对沙漠环境的独特影响的证明-一个深入探究和思考人类本质的地方。“她有着丰富的意义。正如库恩所说，它不仅指的是单一的图形，而且还指无限的地平线，以及从思想中呈现出来的线条。§