States by Jacob Love
States by Jacob Love
18-04-12
NEW PHOTOGRAPHY WORKS FROM JACOB LOVE
20.04.2012 - 3.06.2012
PRIVATE VIEW THURSDAY 19th APRIL 7pm
Through images of stunning natural America and a group of unique mysterious characters, Dalston Superstore presents States a new body of work by artist Jacob Love.
In Spring 2011, Love embarked on a road trip across America that culminated at a stay in a rural queer community. As he interacted with the living realities of both the community and the landscape around it, an alternative view of the American dream began to form. Here Love presents images where the realities of resistance and change fuse with fantasy and a ’new world’ becomes fully realized.
Love presents a series of landscapes and portraits that through colour, positioning and framing, subvert traditional notions of America in beautiful yet occasionally shocking ways.
The landscapes are presented framed upside down. By inverting these images and removing all human traces from them, Love turns back time, creating magical Utopian worlds that the viewer steps into blinking, blinded by the sun that confronts them. But are these worlds really from the past or perhaps a vision of America’s post capitalist future?
These disorienting and magnetic landscapes are accompanied by a 10 metre panorama that- presented the correct way up – introduces a new visual language to the work on display, one of traditional pastorialism. It is only on closer inspection that the lone figure in the landscape presents himself to you. As you engage with him further you begin to see that he is dressed as a gogo boy, engrossed in his own self-pleasure. Both his virile (and possibly feral) activity and the shocking pink of his leggings jar uncomfortably with his lush and somehow innocent surroundings. As with the inversion of the landscapes, our lone masturbator works to subvert our understanding of the American landscape and how we interact with the world of nature that surrounds us.
At the far end of the bar, illuminated on light boxes are the possible inhabitants of this new world; a collection of people emerging from darkness, perhaps stepping into the sunlight of the inverted landscapes. As with the figure in the large image on the main wall, these personalities embody an alternative, queer idealism at odds with the conservative country they now call home, yet they are embracing the foundations on which America was built and also offering the best blueprint for it’s future.
States will be exhibited at Dalston Superstore from Friday the 20th of April till the 3rd of June 2012. private view is Thursday 19th April 2012 from 7pm
For more information visit: www.jacoblove.net
States by Jacob Love