Image of the Week: Fig. 9, Victoria Jenkins

Fig. 9, is an image taken from photographer Victoria Jenkin’s current solo exhibition AS IF IT WERE at CABIN Gallery, Southfields, London.

Here in Jenkin’s photograph, three fish are aligned with three swatches of white paper. Perhaps these are labels, yet to be filled out, or perhaps they are measuring size or, indeed, have been placed to contrast the colours and textures of stark white and silver scale. It might even be easy to entertain that this diagram might be the graphic plan for a game; white squares of paper menacingly seek out swimming sardines in a Pac-man style maze land.

Jenkin’s work “explores the nature of the unknown through fictional scientific works” which ask more questions than they solve. Her images suggest the finding of random encyclopedia or textbook pages where only the diagrams remain, their meanings and illustration now divorced from fact or explanation. Jenkin’s is interested in the idea of the fictional archive and the re-interpretation and adaptation of pre-existing images. They have, she says on the CABIN website, “the suggestion of something logical or demonstrative… My selection process comes from two pools. (…) I collect images which I reference in my constructions and I collect objects which I build from, and the process is in looking for one which suits the other, it is very much a two way street.”

AS IF IT WERE runs at CABIN Gallery until May 3rd and is open Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 10 – 6pm.

www.cabin-gallery.com/victoria-jenkins-exhibition-april-2015