David Jolly, Love Town

Using the artist’s own photographic documentation as source material, the series begins with two images depicting the end of the camera roll. Here, Jolly emphasizes the way in which these paintings can be seen to document a specific temporal experience, while also highlighting their relationship to the medium of analogue film.

In the images that follow, the artist depicts the transition from dusk into night and then through to the next day. Here, the seductive deep blue of twilight is contrasted sharply with the glare of morning sunshine, where sleepy figures ponder the events of the night before. By following this sequence, the viewer is given a strong sense of the festival’s experiential, cyclic qualities, and the manner in which it is set apart from the usual pace of everyday life.

For the series, Jolly has once again painted on the reverse side of glass, a technique that lends his work a luminous finish while allowing him to deftly convey the subtlest variations in light. Capturing the particular flare and distortion of festive lanterns hanging from trees in the darkness, and the dappled sunshine that hits tents and tarps during the day, these works allow the viewer to partake in the visually sensuous, and seductively ephemeral qualities of the festival.