Johan Bech Jespersen, Street cast (2024), photos made in collaboration with photographer David Johnson, flatbed print on glass, cast concrete.

With a background in architecture, Johan Bech Jespersen’s practice considers how spatial constructs and images code and choreograph our movements, relations, and collective desires. Using sculpture, video, performance, installations and print, his work often explores power relationships within real space and within the staged spaces of image production, and elaborates the role of fiction and fantasy in the production of sexuality and social behaviors. Jespersen’s Street cast merges the two associations of its title: casting its subjects for a trio of photographs the way that agents select non-professionals from public space, and literally casting the street itself in concrete. The models in the triptych of over-sized photographs are uniformed laborers who work in urban space, whose occupation is tied to their bodies and the built environment. The artist understands this visible labor as also an embodied performance subjected to the public gaze, an erotic spectacle of the body at work, where individuals are transformed into objects of desire and archetypes of masculinity. Elaborating how the idealized male laboring body–complete with uniforms and props–is a dominant trope in sexual entertainment, Jespersen invited these workers for a photoshoot with the erotic photographer David Johnson, whose past vocation as a male stripper provides a nuanced take on the performativity of work. In the images, the workers implement their daily public choreography in front of the camera, which Johnson translates and eroticizes using his distinctive light, camera, and studio effects, elaborating the sensuality of their physiques and their actions. With nods to the conventions seen in classical erotica’s representation in pop culture, Johnson’s work here crystallizes the idea of erotica as fiction and abstraction, rendering quotidian human relations and toil into forms of seduction. The resulting collaborative works have been printed on large sheets of glass that mimic the smooth surfaces of the modern cityscape (at once transparent and hyper-reflective), and recall the facades of strip clubs and store fronts

. In front of this stimulating frontage, Jespersen has placed a large concrete square that establishes the exhibition as a street and stage for the performers in the images, and perhaps the audience themselves. The sculpture is a cast of the transition from street to sidewalk, a threshold of pavement demarcating certain forms of activity, presentation, and movement, a liminal bridge between public and private. Conflating theater, striptease, and the street, Jespersen calls attention to how all architecture is a choreographing of the body, a site for performativity that sets a scene and influences the actions of its occupants. Architecture depends on the human body for its proportions, while the body in turn finds and understands itself through architecture. Street cast exposes the eroticism of this relationship, as well as the erotics of labor itself, by investigating how masculine sexuality, seduction, and desire are coded within our urban environment.