Luis Jacob

b. 1971, Peru

Album VIII (made for e v+ a 2009) consists of hundreds of images culled from a variety of books, magazines and other publications. These images are montaged together within plastic-laminate panels, and hung sequentially in the gallery as an ‘image bank’ – that is, a kind of authorship-in-quotation-marks.

Through processes of visual association, the images of Album VIII compose an extended (even, epic) narrative around various themes – mapping and the translation of lived experience into a two-dimensional surface; construction and the built ‘unconscious’; embodiment and the capacities of our bodies; the fabrication of worlds and the possibility for transformation. These topics weave together to form an encyclopedic thesis on the roots of social experience in techniques of construction.

Album VIII is an invitation to construct associative narratives about our social experience by means of the visual material that surrounds us in the expanded cultural environment. For the artist, it signals an act of talking back at the media, perhaps a consumerist ‘creativity’, utilising the aesthetics of the bulletin board, the collector’s scrapbook, or the DJ’s mixing console. For the viewer, it is an invitation to a game of connect-the-dots, a making sense by means of the thinking eye.

(Text: reading the city catalogue, 2009)