Jack Laver

Exploring the transformative nature of subliminal imagery, experimenting with pigments, material and insubstantial quality of light, Jack Laver presents a new body of works where sensitivities of chiaroscuros capitulate with materiality, and the will to create. Radiating deep-time and transformation, Laver works over a site of congealing agency — where a single undulation in a line of ink and pigments relies on all others in the arrangement to end its position. Networks of material passage and bleeding thresholds cling together on each surface. The abstract assemblages of the work dispute impoverished geometries that shape our engagement with the world, and draw us towards notions of entanglement, where shadows cut out the shape of verity.

The composition of Laver’s fluid encounters can be seen to echo out across the breadth of reality. These nonlinear formations expose an underlying habit in the structural behavior of matter, and the diverse range of their material occurrence has inspired a broad range of elds into the study of complexity. Their theories call upon such formations to explain the self-organizing behavior that builds fungal networks, waterways, the veining of blood throughout your body, and other systems of material passage and exchange that facilitate life. However, they also speak to the patterns of movement in systems that withdraw from access.Those systems that step away from our ability to perceive due to the momentary blip of existence we have, within the vast reach of their operation. Here, these nonlinear structures have been used to explain the distribution of crime hotspots in cities, the outbreak of u epidemics, uctuations of economy, or the dispersal of information and ideas. The systems appear insubstantial, their spatial patternings hard to point to, or hold complete in the mind. But, though their passages will not hold a shape for our inspection, they are no less real. We are snared in their causality, shaped by it. We feel their effects. See them in shadows; they throw up across the walls.

Jack Laver (b. 1998) is a London based multimedia artist and musician. His experiments with ink, adhesive and resin, investigate dependency and dissonance through material passage. These vast surfaces, at times, share a resemblance to action painting, or aerial landscape photography, yet retain their sculptural, uid presence. What we are offered comes from conditions that are far less concerned with human centred perspectives, and retreat from means of categorisation. The works stand in recognition of materials, and depend on their performance, as oscillating forms resonate with veins, roots, weather systems, or avenues of fractured river systems that cut through the landscape. Even stranger bodies of material discourse have symmetry with their composition. A bridge to that which withdraws from access, hidden by subterranean depths, or the limited perception we gain from our momentary blip of existence. Laver oers nonlinear structures of contemplation that speak to the physical realities of nature.