Holly Graham
After Harry Jacobs: Outside
29 September - 29 October 2017 | Domino Houses Billboard, Bounds Green Road, N22 8YB
After Harry Jacobs: Outside builds upon a body of work centred around studio images taken from the extensive archive of late South London-based photographer Harry Jacobs, now housed in the Lambeth Archives. The works in this series draw on an interest in how the studio, frequented largely by the Afro-Caribbean community from the 1950s through to the 1990s, acted throughout this period as a neutral flattened space, staging compressed narratives. In pulling backdrops and props to the foreground, the pieces in this series seek to explore this notion of flattening and expansion both formally and thematically.
Holly Graham’s Cypher Billboard pulls between realities and fictions. Honing in on small re-photographed sections of Jacobs’ original blown-up studio backdrop, the piece utilises the vast scale of the billboard format as a pitch set for a play-off between the elastic possibilities of resizing and zoom in photographic representational imagery. Continuing the tree-top skyline, the photo-montage stages a failed attempt at an act of camouflage – an overlaying, or re-placing, of quasi-tropical landscape onto existing urban surroundings. An honest image, it sits exposed. It allows a peeping shoulder, a generous seam of bare table-wood, tears in paper, gloss sheen of plastic. Hints and tricks lie in layers.
Holly Graham is a London-based artist. She undertook her BFA at Oxford University and graduated from MA Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in 2014, where she received the Thames Barrier Print Studio Graduate Award and the Augustus Martin Award for Innovation in Print. | http://www.hollygraham.co.uk/
