Patrick Jackson: My Dark Architect
François Ghebaly gallery presents My Dark Architect, an exhibition of photographs, sculptures, and silkscreens by Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Jackson.
The first room of the gallery is occupied by black and white photographs in aluminum frames. Some of the images are taken outdoors, capturing public sculptures in Los Angeles: car silhouettes on a semicircle, a recumbent limbless animal, an axe stuck in the side of a building. Others are taken from inside Jackson’s apartment: a dresser, an unmade bed. In one, the artist’s head sits on a platter on a table, his body concealed by disorienting mirrors. The photographs surround a line of found object sculptures displayed on stacked glass shelves.
At the heart of the exhibition are five modular shelving unit sculptures, each roughly the size of a human body and its personal space. They are made up of horizontal sheets of glass set between clear plastic forms that look like a cube melting into a sphere. Stacked and alternately rotated, these translucent pillars are reminiscent of Brancusi’s Endless Column. “My original idea,” Jackson noted, “was to design shelves that seem to float, that make any object they hold appear weightless. This is often the goal with display and advertising: to make a product feel like an image, like it is untouched and frozen in time. The empty shelves themselves have a sense of this, as if they are image and object fused together.” Products that rely on their images require protection in the real world; every iPhone needs a case. Jackson encloses and reinforces his structures in metal construction scaffolding.
Surrounding the shelving units is a new series of silkscreened aluminum panels. Each silkscreen image is a page taken from the final printed edition of the Sears catalogue, published in 1993. The pages present common household items: mirrors, ladders, mechanical tools, knives, basketball backboards. The repetition and flat, graphic layout lend the products a nulled out quality.
Patrick Jackson (b. 1978, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles. He will present two installations for Made in L.A. 2020 at the Hammer Museum and the Huntington. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Galerie Vallois, Paris; and Nicole Klagsbrun, New York, among others. He has also shown in a number of biennials and group exhibitions, including Momentum 9: Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Norway; Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre, Canada; CLEARING, New York; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; and CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, France. Jackson received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the University of Southern California. My Dark Architect is his fourth solo presentation with François Ghebaly.
