Public Gallery is pleased to present Only Love Will Break Your Heart, the first UK solo exhibition by New York born, Los Angeles based artist Shaniqwa Jarvis. Through floral motifs, layered compositions, and reflective surfaces, the exhibition attends to traces of grief, memory, and loss while foregrounding questions of spectatorship. Central to the exhibition is a sustained interrogation of the material condition of the photographic image. Across fifteen new works, Jarvis considers photography as object-based and subject to physical encounter, resisting the medium’s association with flatness and fixity.
Acrylic washes resembling worn netting map across several works, functioning as both compositional devices and markers of deterioration. In from negative to positive (2026), a weblike film draws the eye into a field of blur, through which purple gerbera daisies gradually come into focus. Flowers, the recurring subject of Jarvis’ work, register fragility and impermanence while also recalling the historical language of still life and its associations with cyclical change. These cycles are emphasized in only love can break your heart (2026), where marguerite daisies converge into ruby red dahlias, like one season bleeding into the next.
Questions of spectatorship arise through Jarvis’ use of reflective and translucent materials. Silk paintings stretched across mirrored surfaces produce shifting, live double exposures in which the viewer is folded into the image, their reflection tracked across the surface. The mirror functions less as a device of self-recognition than as a threshold through which multiple temporalities and layers of encounter remain in circulation. In works such as again and again and again. (2026), the artist’s own hand enters the composition as subject, disorienting the viewer by positioning them from Jarvis’ vantage point.
In entirety, Jarvis’ work offers a sustained consideration of how material processes complicate conventional understandings of photography and spectatorship. Walter Benjamin argued in 1936 that an artwork’s ‘aura’ refers to its unique presence in time and space, failing photography and film by virtue of their inherent reproducibility. Yet Jarvis reclaims what might be understood as the aura of the photographic work through layered processes that insist on presence. If a work’s aura is understood as the ability of an object to return one’s gaze, Jarvis’ work actively stages this reciprocal relation, forcing a confrontation of one’s own embodied encounter, reaffirming the image’s capacity to retain a here and now.
