Patrick Jackson: All Signs Fail
François Ghebaly is pleased to present All Signs Fail, a large-scale installation of new sculptures and images by Patrick Jackson. The exhibition is made up of four parts: a giant billboard of eyes; altered bus shelter posters; a statue of a mother holding her child; and a monumental structure. Jackson has described the show as “a lot of images and a memorial.”
The billboard is a reprint of the “Eye Syphilis Is Serious” public health campaign, put up around Los Angeles by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in 2024. The AHF provided Jackson with the original Photoshop file; he removed its text. The billboard stands 44 feet wide and 15 feet tall, filling the gallery on a diagonal.
Standing before the billboard are a woman and her child, figures made for very different purposes and purchased by Jackson as sculptural readymades. The woman, wearing a handmade sweater, pants and sneakers, was ordered from Starpery, an online adult doll company. The child, dressed with similar care, is a reborn doll purchased at the 2025 Dolls of the World Expo in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Fifteen found bus shelter posters line the gallery walls, each an advertisement for a film or streaming television series. All the productions are copies of some sort — sequels, remakes, parts of franchises, genre pics, biopics. The posters are displayed in order of release date, and screenprinted or painted with symbols of the seasons: falling leaves, snow, flames.
The billboard is backed by a two-story scaffolding structure with a triangular footprint. At the center of this structure is a box-shaped “building” designed with memorial architecture in mind. Visitors can walk through a narrow doorway into a minimal, meditative version of a home, with an upstairs, downstairs, hallways and rooms.
Patrick Jackson (b. 1978, Los Angeles) is an interdisciplinary artist focused on producing large-scale sculptural installations. Influenced by architecture, theater, and film production, he develops projects over extended periods, composing and releasing them in ways that echo these disciplines.
Jackson lives and works in Los Angeles. He earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from the University of Southern California. Jackson is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. He has exhibited sculptural installations at the Hammer Museum, The Huntington, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and his apartment. He has had multiple solo exhibitions at François Ghebaly, first showing with the gallery in 2008. He has also exhibited solo projects at Kristina Kite Gallery in Los Angeles, Galerie Vallois in Paris, and Nicole Klagsbrun in New York.
