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| Alex Jackson, The Butter Thief (detail), oil and polyurethane on panel, 60 x 48 inches. |
My work is heavily rooted in my experience as an African-American and East-Indian man. by employing a blend of characters, symbols, and iconography sourced from a variety of cultural and artistic mediums, I create a quasi-fictional world. Through the use of memories, narrative, research from personal experience, African-American history, Indian mythology, and literature, I have created a platform from which a discussion can be had around contemporary notions of race and identity. The rigid lines of racial and cultural division are challenged by the figure’s resistance to depiction in any particular mode or representation. The space in which the figure exists often presents a series of referential collisions, oscillating between the autobiographical and the mythic, the historical and the contemporary, and the fictional and the real, presenting a specific cross-cultural hybridity. This hybridity is an amalgamation of cultural beliefs, ancestries, and histories, as well as a blend of Western and Eastern pictorial vernaculars.
Pick up a copy of the August/September 2015 issue of New American Paintings on newsstands now or order online here.
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