Photography professor Charles DeBus discusses Simen Johan’s exhibit, “Until the Kingdom Comes,” during class on Wednesday. The exhibit is open in the Pollock Gallery, located in the Hughes-Trigg Student Center, through Oct. 8. (Spencer J Eggers/The Daily Campus)

A new solo exhibit by Swedish artist Simen Johan has opened in the Pollock Gallery on Southern Methodist University’s campus. It is entitled Until the Kingdom Comes and is an exhibition of large-scale photographs of animals in a natural environment, an environment sometimes manipulated by human existence.

Johan’s images are a combination of traditional photography and digital editing to create dramatic scenes.

“He can’t get what he wants without making an image, but with that said he is not finding the totality of what he wants,” Philip Van Keuren, a good friend of Johans, as well as a Professor of Art at SMU and Pollock Gallery Director said. “If he could go somewhere, take a photograph and it would say what he wants it to say that’d be it, but he can’t.”

The photographs in the show are eerie and beautiful, depicting animals in all different environments, that Johan manipulates to show how the natural world has been effected by human existence.

“The images are meant to be both disturbing and haunting, and basically instructive,” Van Keuren said. “I think, in a sense, opening peoples eyes to some things. It is a funny world he created.”

One of the most powerful pieces in the exhibit is “Untitled #153.” This is a dark and dramatic photograph of a buffalo lying in the middle of rubble. The colors are very muted and there are human objects in the photo such as a piece of

clothing, books, paper and a shoe.

The mere size of this image allows the piece to make a statement, then with the size of the massive buffalo taking up the vast majority of the frame makes this a truly memorable piece of art.

The animals he uses in his photographs are sometimes living, found in captivity or in the wild, and sometimes they are deceased, either roadkill or taxidermied. The deceased animals are normally positioned and crafted for the photograph.

“Questions of authenticity versus artificiality arise when one recognizes that these are not all animals living in their natural habitats,” Mark Scala, Chief Curator, Frist Center for the Visual Arts,said.

This series began in 2004, and first shown in New York City at Yossi Milo Gallery in 2006. Since then, “Until Kingdom Comes” has been shown at the 21C Museum in Louisville, Ky. and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn.

Johan’s website archives his past work and shows his incredible range as an artist and the knowledge he would like to share with the art world.

Johan will be giving a public lecture in SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts Sept. 27. He will also give a public talk in the Pollock Gallery Sept. 28.

Pollock Gallery, nestled on the main floor of Hughes-Trigg Student Center on Southern Methodist University’s campus, is open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.