Artist: Jimmy Robert

Thomas Dane Gallery presents The Erotics of Passage, Jimmy Robert’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, his first in the gallery in London. The new body of work continues Robert’s exploration of the intersection between photography and sculpture, delving into the instability of memory, image, and narrative.

Working with found images, old family photographs and constructed collages Robert avoids the formality and orthodoxy of typical framing methods; instead, allowing his photographs to hang from, drape over, and fold around invented wooden structures. By undermining his photographs’ key illusory function, that of being a window into representation, they teeter in an uncertain place, oscillating between image and object, presence and illusion.

Jutting out from the wall, balanced freestanding in space, and unglazed, the photo-objects feel precarious and vulnerable, emphasised by the charred surfaces of many of the wooden structures. The spectral images drawn across time from Robert’s own family history and studio image archive coalesce into an unstable, intimate visual album.

Echoing throughout the exhibition is the open-ended motif of the white collared shirt, a symbol both ordinary and loaded. Through multiple references to this familiar and seemingly benign object Robert explores its multiple readings as uniform, disguise, costume, or fashion item, moving between the personal and political, the intimate and the institutional.

Embedded within the exhibition is a series of texts by art historian and writer Elvan Zabunyan. These writings weave through and around the artworks, forming a reciprocal dialogue with Robert’s practice. Together, image, object and text reflect on the slipperiness of personal and collective memory—how it is framed, fictionalised, and performed.

Robert takes the exhibition’s title from James S. Williams’ book on Marguerite Duras’ later writing including her semi-autobiographical work, L’amant, in reference to its meditation on memory as both illusion and confession—a marking of personal time through the body, through image, and through gesture. In this exhibition, memory is rendered as fragile, precarious, and in constant flux.

Jimmy Robert’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses performance, photography, film and collage, frequently collapsing distinctions between these mediums. Robert’s interest in how the body can be personified through materials and how materials can be performed through the body is a major force that integrates his longtime work with performance with his larger practice. Robert has choreographed performances within exhibition spaces, in relation to existing architectural structures, as well as restaging, reframing or sampling historical performances. The frequent citation of moments from art history, film and literature is characteristic of his deeply layered narratives.