Jake Preval: Bloom

Aftercare, 2024 Hand finished digital print on Canson rag 310gsm, routed Dibond, Vic Ash frame 60 x 60 cm Edition of 3 plus AP

Bloom is Jake Preval’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, premiering a large-scale video installation alongside a new suite of photo-objects which comprise ambiguous and ruptured faces and bodies held in space.

Preval’s expanded sculptural practice addresses the rituals and intimate enactments of queer desire, engaging sex—and, often, the materials of sex—to operate at the intersection of humour, celebration and social critique. Bloom continues these explorations, and renews the artist’s engagement with dance, working with trained dancers in what Preval describes as ‘an orgiastic sublime, a Bacchanalian dance, a tender queer happening’. Masked in the faces and limbs of Preval’s friends and lovers, the dancers are scored by his dream-like composition and filmed from both front and back, so that the mechanics of both costume and movement are revealed.