Carol Jackson has worked in Chicago for almost two decades while navigating epic literature, industrial age americana, and the idea that “the future belongs to ghosts”. Jackson recently exhibited work in the highly prestigious Whitney Biennial in NYC and at Chicago’s Threewalls Gallery. The Comp Magazine caught up with Jackson for a Q&A that provides insight into this prolific and thoughtful artist.
You’ve been making art in Chicago for a little while now. I recall initially encountering your work at Ten in One Gallery in Wicker Park (I believe?) during the mid 1990s. When did you arrive in Chicago? Have you seen the continually changing gallery environment impacting your creative practice?
I came to Chicago from Los Angeles in 1990 for my MFA at SAIC. I began showing at Ten in One in 1997. At that time there weren’t any apartment galleries that I can recall, but non-profits like Randolph Street Gallery were still around to exhibit emerging Chicago artists. When these venues closed the apartment/makeshift galleries began to appear. I wouldn’t say my practice has changed or as a result, but it does seem that the art scene has become divided into factions of familiarity.
Carol Jackson, Installation view at Threewalls, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2014
Your work continues to evolve. You’ve worked with leather for instance and now are creating these sculptural pieces and investigating new materials? Was there something that instigated this transition in materials? Did the content change?
I’ve worked and continue to work with leather as a general reference to death and death of the west. The new materials, paper mache and photography have allowed me to explore the same ideas in a broader way. I’d been trying to work three dimensionally with leather, but many of those experiments failed, looking stilted and like poorly made saddles for aliens. I needed a break from the tediousness of leather embossing and the quickest material I could thing of was paper mache. Anyone can do it, even after the apocalypse which my work anticipates.
So, what’s it like to be in one of the most curious, high profile and sometime scandalous exhibitions…the Whitney Biennial? Has this had any impact on what you plan for the future?
I’ll give you a full report on how the Whitney experience has impacted my present and future in March 2015. It hasn’t been an immediate game changer, but opportunities are slowly rolling in from people and places I wouldn’t have been noticed by otherwise. I’m still driving the same 1999 suzuki esteem.
Carol Jackson, Satan’s Cue Card #7, 2014
You note that your work is influenced by “the vast changes in time and space found in Milton’s Paradise Lost.” This is an epic work. Why are you interested in this and how can this influence be seen in your work?
I’ve been interested in epic poetry for many years. This interest is more keyed into ideas regarding oral and written culture from the past and present. The web-based digital imagery is a reference to the idea (Walter Ong) that the internet is the best contemporary example of oral culture. The ideas and comments and pornographic etc. elements expand and contract with each telling and retelling. It’s presence and content is always being negotiated, as were the epic poems of their day. Paradise Lost is not an openly recited work as a rule, but it takes the same polymorphous impulse and makes the individual reader the arena of interpretation. The reader becomes aware of the creative regenerative act of interpretation that our experience of language oral or written.
Carol Jackson, Deputy #1, 2014
What are you working upon now? Are there any future exhibition plans?
Right now I’m working on several mask-like paper mache pieces. Mask-like only because of their symmetry. I’m also at work on several empty leather frames. I have a show coming up at the Cleve Carney gallery at the College of Du Page and a show with Tyler Wood Gallery in San Francisco.
Carol Jackson lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Jackson has has exhibited her work widely throughout the United States and held solo shows in Chicago, New York and Naples, Italy. Jackson’s work has appeared in the New Art Examiner, Cmagazine, the New Yorker, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Frieze and other publications.
To view additional works by Carol Jackson, please visit: http://jacksoncarol.com/home.html
Carol Jackson, artist, Chicago, IL, 2014
Interview and portrait by Chester Alamo-Costello
