membership / artist member

Jamie Shovlin

download cv here

Shovlin is perhaps best known for a series of ambitious projects, including 'Naomi V. Jelish' (2001-2004) and 'Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976-81' (2003-6), in which the artist constructed extensive and seemingly real archives, which were then revealed to be elaborate fictions.

When these works were shown at the Saatchi Gallery, London, Freight & Volume in New York and in Beck's Futures at the ICA, Shovlin was hailed as an art-world hoaxer par excellence, a reading of the work which perhaps foregrounds the extraordinary technical facility involved in producing the work but which sidelines the seriousness of his undertaking; both archives in fact represent a profound meditation on truth and doubt, and the subjectivity of interpretation.

While the Lustfaust archive is more playful the Jelish material is darkly poetic and evocative, heralding a major theme which runs through all Shovlin's recent work: loss - in particular of innocence - and the unreliability of memory. In Shovlin's world the past is retrievable only as a form of simulacra, flawed and inherently doubtful.

Jamie Shovlin is interested in the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention, history and memory.

He is an artist whose work combines extraordinary facility as a draughtsman, printmaker, painter and writer with conceptual complexity and playfulness. His painstakingly researched and executed works merge inherently flawed systems, pseudo-scientific exactitude and doubtful philosophical propositions with the seemingly objective experience of the archive.

Through his projects Shovlin questions how information becomes authoritative and explores the way that we map and classify the world in order to understand it.

http://www.haunchofvenison.com/en/index.php#page=home.artists.jamie_shovlin

http://www.unosunove.com

http://www.lustfaust.com

http://www.naomivjelish.org.uk

• ARTfutures 2004

  31st March — 4th April 2004
  City of London School Queen Victoria Street, London EC4