For Shaniqwa Jarvis, the photograph is never complete. Whilst, by nature, they distill one distinct moment in time into a single image, the photo also captures a snippet of the human experience. From today until June 7, the Los Angeles-based artist is sealing this essence into something tangible, transforming East London’s Public Gallery into a kind of living photograph for her first solo exhibition in the UK, Only Love Can Break Your Heart. “Photography is often quickly consumed, and I want to slow that down by treating it as something physical and unstable,” says Jarvis. “Through layering, reflection and obstruction, the images don’t fully resolve – they ask the viewer to participate in how meaning is formed.” Photo not just as image, but as object too.
Jarvis often looks at the cycles of loss and renewal we traverse in life (hence, the show’s title) in her practice and here, she considers the process of grieving to reconfigure it not as an end but a doorway to new ways of seeing. “This body of work sits around grief, memory and resilience, but not in a fixed or illustrative way,” she says. “More in how those things surface, dissolve and reappear.” Across 12 new works formed from silk, mirrored surfaces, aluminium and collage, photography is abstracted into something tangible which the viewer’s own perspective can affect.
Layered printed silk pieces hang before a set of mirrors to create live double exposures that thrust the viewer into the photo’s composition and, elsewhere, a recurring floral motif – Jarvis’ symbol for the fragility and resilience of memory – brings to mind questions of the foundations that remain when pictures are handled, concealed and transformed. A set of collaged works bring together C-type and aluminium printing that hammer home the artist’s proposition to resist the supposed flat nature of the photographic image with an insistence on presence and physicality. Jarvis says, “The materials came out of a desire to make physical what I was feeling – the experience of being hardened by grief while also softening to the realisation that love is everywhere.”
The show concludes on a sentimental note with a moving image work that intermingles personal archival footage and new recorded material tying the themes of Only Love Can Break Your Heart together. Presented almost as a stream-of-consciousness, Jarvis partakes in intimate discussions of topics such as health, her original home of New York City, worth, art, motherhood and labour. It’s a sobering finale which grounds this exploration of memory and permanence in a consuming sensoriality.
Accompanying the exhibition, Jarvis is releasing her second book, Guts, with Tokyo-based publisher Super Labo. Encompassing photography, collage, double exposures and self-portraiture, the release features an introduction by curator Essence Harden and will be launched at Climax Books in London on May 6.
Only Love Can Break Your Heart can leave you feeling disconcerted. The photograph is something we are sure we understand – permanent, still, a mere slice of the past – but Jarvis seeks to unravel this naturalisation at Public Gallery.
The artist herself puts it best: “There’s a sense of intimacy and slight disorientation in the work, where you become aware of yourself in relation to the image. It resists immediate clarity, so what stays with you is more emotional than narrative.”
Photography courtesy of Shaniqwa Jarvis and Public Gallery. Discover the exhibition here.
