“A Peanut, Half a Horse, a Chicken Foot, a Burning Cigarette and a Black Hole” (2011). Okay Rachel de Joode, I’m listening...

The work of Berlin-based multimedia artist and founder behind Studio de Joode grabs, no, demands your attention. The versatile photographer who is not (by any means, really) scared of absurdity, sources shoot ideas from common and found objects to create still-life studio based images commissioned by countless international brands and featured in publications aplenty. The photographs produced under Studio de Joode are vibrant, wacky and hilariously witty. For the last eight years, Joode’s studio has been directly involved in fashion imaging and has since effectively broken the often trivial surface of fashion photography, revealing its underlying complexities.

“It is my intention to point out the purposelessness and absurdity of human existence through the semiotics of ‘things’, this can be: contemporary artifacts, information flows, human nature, art or myself.”

Joode’s sculptural installations are carefully staged, functioning as free floating signifiers, and are photographed to perfection. How does one make a mountain of cascading pepperoni pizza look so pristine?! Though her work may seem like a string of silly objects motionlessly interacting on camera, Joode is playfully and thoughtfully attempting to tease out the hidden and potentially non-existent meanings from recontextualised clutter; a process realized through her artwork.

And as if you weren’t already impressed with this crazy creative, Rachel de Joode is also the founder and art-director of Meta Magazine and founder and curator of the art auction house de Joode & Kamutzki. If you don’t mind feeling ridiculously intimidated, more than I assume you already are, check out more of her work via her website.