PSLA is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Los Angeles based artist Jaklin Romine (b. 1985). Living with a disability, Romine’s physical limitations do not define her ability to make art. Romine’s work is monumental and immersive, ambitious and arresting. Existing somewhere between photography, sculpture, and installation, Romine expands our idea of the image by defying it’s aesthetic, material, and conceptual conventions. Photographic prints are imagined in three and four dimensions as sculptural objects stemming from the wall, erupting from the ground, and suspending in air.
For her first solo show at PSLA, Romine brings together two ongoing bodies of work. Inspired by her grandmother’s comment, ‘Why bring me flowers when I’m dead? When you had the time to do it when I was alive’ (2018–) is a photographic series that documents the flowers Romine shares with her grandmother every week. Reminiscent of Dutch master paintings, Romine invokes the duality of life and death inherent within vanitas, or still life, tradition. Turning the camera on herself, Romine’s second series ‘living with sci’ (2018–) acts as a record of the traumas her body experiences in areas where sensation has been lost due to her spinal cord injury. Juxtaposing the floral arrangements, visceral self portraits depicting Romine’s bruised torso and bloody elbows document the pain her body has endured but not physically felt. With both series, Romine gives form to her photographs by printing them on translucent fabrics that are layered on top of skeletal sculptures. The shapes created by this process resemble bodies and/or topographical maps that are either larger than life or not to scale, depending how you look at it.
