Leap Into the Void (Yves Klein "cover")
2025 "cover" of
Yves Klein's Leap into the Void , of 1960
In their "cover" Noah Travis Phillips launches themself into the abyss of the mountains of the Colorado Plateau and Front Range, the Rocky Mountains of the American West.
As in their multiple forms of collages, Phillips' photomontage paradoxically creates the impression of freedom and abandon through a highly contrived process. In March of 2025 Phillips awkwardly photographed themself in pieces, reaching out as far as possible with one arm, while posing their head, torso, legs, feet, fists, hair, and so on. They used this series of pictures to re-create a jump from the peak of a mountain into a seemingly bottomless canyon, incidentally gesturing to 'Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog' in addition to Klein's iconic image.
Something they have claimed to have actually done since they were a teenager. A seminal gesture, Phillip's re-creation is slightly tongue-in-cheek, and highlights "seamfulness" (rather than the seamless) and the speculative and fictional in the "documentation" of their reenactment. Phillips perpetuates the illusion that they might be capable of flight by perpetuating the image on the Internet, as Klein did in his fake broadsheet.