Press Release
| LUKE JACKSON | The Good Tourist |
| Exhibition Dates: Friday May 25th – Saturday June 23rd 2012 |
| CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is delighted to present Luke Jackson with his first one person show at the gallery. Jackson’s practice is inherently multi-disciplinary, the manifestation of which is defined by the original idea. This exhibition, however, consists of an unusually consolidated body of small paintings on canvas. Relating to characteristic concerns, we are presented with deeply atmospheric and predominantly black paintings of often isolated figures, which indicate an obscure and melancholy sense of proto-corporate oppression. As the artist states: The story line of Kafka, where assistants are messengers from one group to another, where no one has a firm place in the world and no inalienable outline, shapes the overall enigma of the work…no one fixed position is delineated and a currency of tourism is developed where the image slips between the past, is re-contextualized and used as varying points of departure. Also drawing on Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Chris Marker’s 1962 film La jetée, Jackson assimilates then encourages slippages in time, place and meaning. As figures emerge from or submerge into impasto blackness Jackson’s subjects become protagonists and we the audience voyeurs, observing the performance actions that although illusive, are apparently mundane. This implication of the everyday though, is shrouded in menace and coercion. By considering systems of power such as surveillance, semiotic codes, implied threat, alienation and dehumanization, and by extension the production of knowledge imposed by cultural and historical rules, Jackson questions the impact of civilizations structures on the free will of the individual. In 2007 Luke and Sam Jackson were the first brothers in history to graduate together from the Royal Academy Schools in London. He has exhibited in galleries and museums in London, Berlin, Frankfurt, New York, Los Angeles and Klaipėda in seminal group shows including New Contemporaries, Anticipation and The Saatchi Gallery & Channel 4’s New Sensations and The Future Can Wait. Jackson won first prize at ArtWorks Open in 2011 and has featured in Art Monthly, Artforum, The Times, Financial Times, Miser & Now and Garageland. |