“Language Nudity Smoking” exhibition by British artist and scanography pioneer, Katerina Jebb on view at Giovanni’s Room, Los Angeles until June 15.

Katerina Jebb, Language Nudity Smoking 

Giovanni’s Room, Los Angeles

British artist and scanography pioneer, Katerina Jebb’s latest exhibition Language Nudity Smoking, presents a series of large-scale transparencies, scanography prints, and a sound work at Giovanni’s Room in Los Angeles. The exhibition is composed of three chapters. 

The first chapter, Language, is composed of 112 framed scanography photographs that reconsider the length, rhythm, and signification of words. In this linguistic exercise, Jebb creates a poetic meta-language that plays with levels of meaning that move between image and text in a Barthian way. Each word dictates a universe to be imagined. Conveyed as titles, these short exercises in language resemble surrealist messages found in cadavre exquis. 

In the second chapter, Nudity, Jebb displays six large-scale scanography studies of the dancer and choreographer Sharon Eyal. Hanging from the ceiling, these ghostly transparent sheets are composed of dozens of body scans. Each ephemeral image evokes the fragmentation of the body, a commentary on the non-corporeal nature of digital technology. Sharon Eyal is revealed as both saintly and eroticized under Jebb’s sharp and poetic eye.

The final chapter, Smoking, is reminiscent of Bukowskian environments where smoking is a central part of the process of writing, creating, and a moment of meditation. At the fire escape to the gallery, the place where viewers smoke, Jebb has installed a soundscape composed in collaboration with Louis Valentin Pinoteau that broadcasts the voice of Alan Kaprow and Guillaume Apollinaire speaking backwards. The act of smoking becomes a meditation on the poetic configurations of visual, textual and sonorous use of language for Jebb. 

On view until June 15, 2024.

Giovanni’s Room

850 S Broadway UNIT 600, 

Los Angeles, CA 90014

United States

Text by Aleph Molinari

Images provided by Giovanni’s Room

Images provided by Giovanni’s Room

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