About Marcus Moonen
Marcus Moonen, born in 1976 in the southeast of the Netherlands. He’s a filmmaker, photographer and musician who has experience writing scripts, directing, filming and editing. He has studied literature (University of Utrecht), philosophy (University of Nijmegen) and audiovisual design (AKV St. Joost Art Academy).
He´s an avid photographer and also produces electronic music, including filmscores under the monikers CausaliDox, sonOnos and Bob Knutton.
In the last decade Marcus has been working on a number of short films, music videos, commercials and short documentaries.
He has produced a number of commissioned photography projects alongside his own photography work which has been shown in exhibitions in Europe and the USA.
In the last 10 years Marcus has produced 10 music albums that have collectively been downloaded 250000 times.
http://marcusmoonen.com
My photography: Looking for the Numinous
As a kid I was always fascinated by sci-fi and space exploration. I wanted so much to become an astronaut. I wanted to experience leaving the earth and looking back at it, to realize how little our endeavors really mean, our petty fights, our conceits about deities.
It’s an exercise I used to do a-lot in my life, I would pretend I was sitting on the moon and looking at the earth. It really helped me get perspective. I was also fascinated by other worlds, I used to love (and still do actually) to imagine the unimaginable. I remember approaching these ephemeral ideas with my mind, knowing I could never touch or materialize them. I had no words for how I felt.
Then I found out German theologian Rudolf Otte coined a term that sort of describes it: 'the Numinous' (I like to spell it with a capital), with which he referred to the (imagined) experience of being in the presence of a deity, or in more secular terms: facing the “wholly other'. For me, the term doesn't hold any religious connotations, it’s just the right word for the experience I'm looking for and want to convey in my images.
When I started taking photos, around the time I was 9 or 10, I noticed I could sometimes, completely by chance, capture something that would resonate with this longing to know the Numinous. It could be an underexposed photo of a family trip to Paris, standing in front of the Louvre Pyramid, or a shot of a plastic bag in close up, resembling mountain ranges on another planet.
Now I no longer depend on luck to get a result that will excite me. I seem to know instinctively what to look for, how to frame it, to get something I can work with. The shot itself, unedited, may not yet reveal all too clearly what I was going for, but once I start manipulating it, tweaking reality, the intended image emerges.
I enjoy messing around with the images in the editing room until they have that look and feel I like so much, this mixture of sci-fi and surrealism. Sometimes I push and manipulate the images further and further so that they become abstract, no longer representative of one singular thing. Yet they maintain, or even gain a strong emanating sense of emotion. Every image to me is like the setting for a scene from a story that’s being told as I take the picture. I start to imagine worlds unfold, intricate lines of causality unfurling into time. To me taking pictures is a way to look differently at the world, like lifting the veil to peek into the realm of (im)possibilities.
Photography
2015 LensCulture Portrait Awards 2015 (editor's pick) Paris, France
Kunstroert, Kasteel Daelenbroeck (solo exhibition) Herkenbosch, The Netherlands
Thiemeloods (solo exhibition) Nijmegen, The Netherlands
ABN AMRO various inhouse projects (2013 - 2015) Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2014 Affordable Art Fair Amsterdam, The Netherlands
See|Me @ Times Square (group exhibition) New York City, USA
2013 See|Me ?The Story of the Creative (g?roup exhibition) Angel Orensanz gallery / Long Island City gallery New York, USA; Long Island, USA
The Quietus Things the Quietus learned at Incubate 2013 (photo credit) London, United Kingdom
