LONDON.- Kearsey & Gold is presenting Innocence, an exhibition featuring 10 photographic prints by American photographer and filmmaker Lily Gavin (b. New York, 1995).

In Gavin’s conception this series is not a means to capture something extant in the world, instead, photography is utilised to create imagery that does not yet exist. In order to do this she constructed miniature worlds from found objects, natural materials, constructed frames and confined spaces.

What is so powerful about Gavin’s photography is that it reawakens the attitude of childhood. This attitude is a phenomenological innocence rather than a moral one. We are reminded to see how we once saw: from our innocent minds, from our lived perspective, the world anew each time. The strangeness of Gavin’s world seems to un-teach us the lessons we have learned. What we think we see, we simultaneously doubt and in our search we find the dilemmas of perception as well as astonishing beauty in the simplest, most minute, realities.

Scale is an important subject for Gavin. She uses the photographic medium as a means to alter the scale of her subjects and to put a frame around them. For Gavin divinity resides in the smallest of details and consciousness permeates all things. From the topography of lost corners in one’s home, the play of reflectivity in mirrors to the tactility of found objects and paint, Gavin is urging us to look once more with curiosity.

In several of the images Gavin has incorporated frames made from materials such as clay and raw canvas. These frames create portals. Compositionally, the frame is more dominant than the subject. This gives us the effect of peering out into a different world. One feels that they are catching a glimpse of what perhaps should not be seen: a magical world that has only been revealed by a tear, an excavation or a hole. The suggestion is that the magic is only thinly veiled.

Gavin’s images hark us back to a time when objects and spaces felt imbued with a power both separate and greater: when large spaces seemed infinite; the smallest objects animated; and any space, no matter how small or mundane, a worthy object of fascination.