Head in the Clouds: Sky-Inspired Artworks
Carol Jackson
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Whether papermache sculptures, hand-tooled leather reworkings or sheet music drawings, Carol Jackson’s absurd combinations often appear to be kitsch, but upon close inspection reveal unexpected incongruities. The work questions of our complicity with commercial signs and the narratives of desire, fantasy, belonging, and otherness the signs evoke. Jackson’s art attracts viewers with its recognizable elements while simultaneously repelling them with the bizarreness of her combinations. For
BLEHH
(2014), Jackson carefully worked an elaborately decorative frame that holds neither artwork nor mirror and regurgitates strands of leather from an orifice near its top. The artist dissociates materials from their original context and purposes as in the case of geode-shaped papermache sculptures embedded with found landscape images taken from the National Park Service webcams of the Western United States. Inspired by the idea that “the future belongs to ghosts,” Jackson’s practice renders familiar landscapes strange.
Carol Jackson has had solo exhibitions in Chicago at Three Walls and Slow Gallery. Her work was featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthaus Speckstrasse in Hamburg, Van Abbe Museum in the Netherlands, and the
Smart Museum of Art in Chicago
.
Whether papermache sculptures, hand-tooled leather reworkings or sheet music drawings, Carol Jackson’s absurd combinations often appear to be kitsch, but upon close inspection reveal unexpected incongruities. The work questions of our complicity with commercial signs and the narratives of desire, fantasy, belonging, and otherness the signs evoke. Jackson’s art attracts viewers with its recognizable elements while simultaneously repelling them with the bizarreness of her combinations. For
BLEHH
(2014), Jackson carefully worked an elaborately decorative frame that holds neither artwork nor mirror and regurgitates strands of leather from an orifice near its top. The artist dissociates materials from their original context and purposes as in the case of geode-shaped papermache sculptures embedded with found landscape images taken from the National Park Service webcams of the Western United States. Inspired by the idea that “the future belongs to ghosts,” Jackson’s practice renders familiar landscapes strange.
Carol Jackson has had solo exhibitions in Chicago at Three Walls and Slow Gallery. Her work was featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthaus Speckstrasse in Hamburg, Van Abbe Museum in the Netherlands, and the
Smart Museum of Art in Chicago
.
Born 1962
Hometown Los Angeles, CA
Lives and Works Chicago, IL
Education
MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, 1992
BFA, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 1987
Works Available for Purchase
No works
