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Credit photos: Geneva Sills.

Karla Leyva & Geneva Sills

Chalton Gallery, London, 11–16 April 2017.

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Photography is a medium that is commonly considered as means to capture moments in time. The aim of this exhibition was to explore the temporality of desire through photography. Interested in queries about the reproduction of the states of mind as artworks and the possibility of embodying human emotions in photography, the exhibition brought together a selection of new and recent work by Karla Leyva and Geneva Sills.

The images showed fragments of the female body along with other figures that carried a symbolic charge: cones and eggs, a black balloon, stones attached with a string to a woman’s waist. With a sensual standpoint and a queer sense of eroticism, Sills investigated questions of gender and sexual politics. Inspired by the American photographer Paul Outerbridge, her cones and eggs delved into the materiality of desire as the medium of photography and its relationship to painting. Leyva, on the other hand, was concerned with the formal expression of emotions and moods; her photos contained some kind of anxiety and a subtle pain. She was interested in the exploration of volume and the two-dimensional image: the boundaries of photography with sculpture and installation, and the use of paper or canvas, as means to reveal illusion and desire.

These two artists challenged the formal possibilities of photography as a medium, dragging the viewer beyond any physical frame or any time-frame, as if the images revealed a desire beyond what they were able to visually show.

Special thanks to Javier Calderón.