Black Artist News: UNFRAMED: Gerald Jackson at gallery onetwentyeight

An artist who takes the work out of the frame

BlackArtistNews | February 10, 2013

Gerald Jackson is an artist who has operated outside the infrastructure of the commercial art world. So it’s only befitting that none of the works in his show at gallery onetwentyeight in New York (on view January 10 – February 10, 2013) were framed.

Well, there was one: a visual mash-up of an Egyptian funerary mask and supermodel Kate Moss entitled Media Beauty Series XV. (A black and white photocopied version of the work was posted on the door of the gallery.) While it’s hard not to question whether the image was appropriated in part from Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, it’s clearly a matter of semantics whether it’s actually a framed collage or freestanding assemblage. Since Media Beauty addresses accepted notions of beauty embedded in the framework of our culture, it’s reasonable to conclude that the frame is a material element of the work, intrinsic to its meaning. Its function is not to protect the work but to project the idea of it.

This kind of mental sleight of hand was apparent in most of the work displayed which ranged from large scale figurative works on paper and abstract paintings to a pyramid-shaped sculpture and a video performance piece. It was a solo show that looked and felt like a group show. In the below video, a studio visit conducted by Stanley Whitney for BOMB magazine, Mr. Jackson gives clarity to the disparity: “My work has always been both figurative and abstract… my mind didn’t have any limitations about what I shouldn’t or should do. Whatever I was doing didn’t have that type of categorized thinking that goes with the college disciplines and things like that.”

Not much biographical information can be collected on Mr. Jackson but it isn’t really necessary. Within moments of the BOMB video you realize that his intellect isn’t guided by conventional wisdom. Gerald Jackson’s history is felt far more viscerally in the space between his words and one’s mental process of them – a considerably more engaging way of receiving biographical info than a timeline of exhibit highlights.