Commentary
We often ask art to perform for us, to stimulate, or soothe, or entertain us. But what happens when art turns the tables, and instead of allowing passive enjoyment it asks us to be the performer, to move and to be moved by it?
With Suzanne Jackson’s work, this question arrives in many guises, but finally it comes down to this: How do we adequately respond? How does it feel to perform our role as an active viewer confronted by works with a discontinuous surface, made of layered paper, that have both painterly and sculptural qualities, that are so obviously charged with the artist’s energy and emotion?
Jackson asks us to immerse ourselves in looking. These are abstract works that are visually sensuous, with transparent glazes and beautiful papers that together form almost topographic expanses. On one level, each work asks us to take delight in the sheer physical feat of its making, like admiring the daring-do of an acrobat or a dancer.
As we enter these works, we find ourselves negotiating a series of jump cuts and seismic events, changes of direction and serendipitous meetings–and reading them not as ruptures, but as a new set of structural principles to constitute a continuous field or body. This series of stops and starts, with its fragments re-membered and cohering seems raw and elegant, cataclysmic and playful.
Jackson allows a wide range of her own artistic impulses to be expressed in a single composition. There is the constructive impetus that deliberately plots shape and structure. There is the intuitive, poetic touch that improvises with chance and change to finds surprising harmonies. And there is the risk-taking desire to come to terms with powerful forces that threaten to distort and break down. Rather than erect an impenetrable defense against them, Jackson engages what might otherwise destroy.
She has employed direct painting on canvas, drawing with graphite, as well as applied paper to create new realities from disparate emotional states and communal experiences. Her pieces read as sensitive receptors, registering in abstract language the influence of cultural continuity, social dislocation, spiritual yearning, and the grace of the physical body. Jackson shows us all the parts, formed and torn, retrieved and reused, and she shows them pieced together into an unexpected oneness. Nothing is lost here, not the pain and confusion, nor the sweetness and the beauty.
– John Mendelsohn
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