GiG Munich is happy to introduce the work of Jo Love, a British artist living and working in London, course director at Camberwell College of Art, University of Arts London and senior lecturer at the University of Brighton. Jo Love has recently completed her PhD at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and her show at GiG Munich marks the continuation of her research into the viewed surface, the materiality and the time of the printed photographic image. Her work combines drawing with printmaking and photography, and uses the specks of dust found on the surface of the photographic image as the starting point of her investigations.

At GiG Munich Jo Love shows two bodies of work. The first consists of a series of landscape drawings made in collaboration with a senior scientist at the Natural History Museum in London. In this series Jo Love re-draws the electron microscope images of marble and graphite particles in order to reclaim the tactile materiality lost to modern technology. She also imbues the image with a different kind of temporality to that of the digital experience.

In the second body of work, Jo Love draws over a digital print of a video still, covering the inkjet surface with a layer of graphite. Only small pockets of saturated colour are left exposed. Taken together, the two different layers create an optically unstable image, disturbing and disrupting the act of viewing.

Both drawings operate at the limits of human perception and invoke ideas of the technological sublime. As Jo Love states, “My interest lies in constructing images which are resonant with my experience and perception of the world: more fractured, open and complex than the more coherent image can convey, and one that offers an arena within which we can contemplate themes of time, memory and mortality.”