Under a Darkening Sky

Standpoint Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by artist Johanna Love. The exhibition centres on the artist’s use of imagery and materials to generate complex readings of space, surface and scale.

Artist Johanna Love combines laser-etching, print, drawing and photographic languages to create unstable, shifting material surfaces and visually unfathomable images. In a new series of work titled ‘The last of the light’ found images of landscape combine with scientific images of dust particles, gathered from the artist’s grandmother’s home in Hamburg, Germany, a city heavily bombed during World War II, and created in collaboration with The Natural History Museum, London. Through the work dust becomes a metaphor for memory, a physical archive of time and place.

Love’s work moves between image and object; layers remain continually incomplete, revealing and hiding, almost falling apart then coming together again. Cut and drawn paper unfolds to suggest open pages of an unreadable book, inviting imagination whilst suggesting a dark history. The paper physically suffers through the etching process, yet it is also celebrating its own materiality.

Love is an artist and academic living in London, UK. Her practice explores images that sit at the intersection between traditional problems of perception and modern technology, images that are at the edge of visual representation and provoke a number of paradoxical readings. Fractured, open and complex images offer an arena within which to contemplate themes of time, memory and mortality.