Jacob Love 'In The Line of Flight'
THC first showcased Love’s photography 4 years ago. Excerpts from the interview reveal a thought provoking approach to capturing London’s swimming pools. In Love’s words: “I’m really interested in progress and potential – human motivation and drive, what pushes us forward and what gives meaning to our lives. Swimming pools and leisure spaces in general engage with these ideas in a really interesting way. They allude to notions of perfection, both on a personal level as the swimmers work on developing the body beautiful, becoming ‘better, fitter, stronger’ and also on a wider cultural level.”
Love presents a series of mathematically composed images split into two equal halves: the real structure and the reflected image of the structure in the pool. If the concrete actuality of the structure relates to what is or the real then the reflected image relates more what could be, the virtual or potential. By inverting the images Love places us in the virtual rather than the real and upsets our reading of the image. As the photo theorist Damian Owen Board writes in his essay on this body of work: “By literally turning the world upside-down, he emphasizes the two worlds that are vying for space in his pictures: the utopia we strive for and the actuality of the lives we live. It is made impossible for us to dive into the perfect world of the reflection, but instead we are tempted by it as it hovers just out of reach above our heads. Of course, by doing this we are also held back from failure. If we could dive into the perfect reflection, our bodies would destroy it immediately. Instead all we can do is try to reach out to it and fail. The horizon line where these two worlds meet acts as a precipice between the reality of the viewer’s existence and the perfection they strive for. By inverting the image the viewer is in danger of losing grip of their utopia and falling into the mess of their own realities.”
As we head toward the Games, Love’s meditative images seem an appropriate body of work to present: caught as they are between the idealised and revered notion of ‘Potential’ and the grounded reality of the actual.
'The Line of Flight' - BOOK
Coinciding with his first solo exhibition at Tenderpixel, artist Jacob Love has created a limited edition photography book, Line of Flight. Includes essays by Carina Lopes & Damian Owen-Board, and an interview with Love by Jessica Farnham. Numbered and signed by the artist, Edition: 150.
£35 - Available in the Club
Bio
Born to wonderful parents in England in 1980, Jacob now lives and works in London. Jacob studied at the University of the West of England and Goldsmiths, where he now teaches. Love’s art practice deals in images, created using large-format film and digital processes which engage with the point where the real meets the virtual. Having exhibited extensively over the past year in both group and solo shows in London and Berlin, Jacob is now preparing new work for two upcoming shows in New York. Alongside this work Jacob has also completed various commecial commissions for clients including: Smithson, the Financial Times, Out There Magazine, the Institute of Contemporary Art and Time Out.
Jacob is currently travelling in the USA and Canada collecting images for an upcoming exhibition at the Leslie Lohman Museum, New York.
