Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Artist and Photographer Shaniqwa Jarvis Opens Her First UK Solo Exhibition
Artist and photographer Shaniqwa Jarvis is best known for her portraiture, but her first solo exhibition in the UK moves her work across a broader terrain. Opening at Public Gallery in London on April 30, the exhibition presents twelve new works spanning silk, mirrored surfaces, aluminium, and collage – marking a significant moment in the New York-born, Los Angeles-based artist’s career.
Titled Only Love Can Break Your Heart, the works explore transformation, reflection, and the persistence of memory — with grief treated not as an end point but as a place of transition. Flowers appear throughout as a recurring motif, standing in for beauty and fragility in equal measure.
Several works reach back to Jarvis’s childhood bedroom, grounding the exhibition in a formative space where her ways of seeing first took shape. Silk works suspended before mirrors, producing live double exposures that respond to the viewer’s movement through the space, while collage works combine C-prints and aluminium prints within single frames, where the relationship between images carries its own quiet meaning.
The exhibition culminates in a moving image work drawing on personal archival footage, recent video, and newly recorded audio — weaving together conversations on motherhood, health, labour, and memory into something deeply personal and considered.
As an early Ala Champ Magazine collaborator, Shaniqwa’s work has a signature identity, her portraiture is incomparable. Creating creative and original editorials for our print issues, where every person she photographed was able to shine through her lens.
Now expanding her artistic practise, the depth to Shaniqwa’s work is now being shown across the world from New York and Los Angeles to London and Tokyo. Institutions such as LACMA, MOCA, and the Hammer Museum recognise this, with her work held in their permanent collections.
Alongside the exhibition, Jarvis releases her second book GUTS, published by Super Labo, with the book launch at Climax Books in London.