Carol Jackson

Born 1962 in Los Angeles, CA
Lives and Works in Chicago, IL

Carol Jackson’s sculptures simultaneously seduce and repel the viewer. For BLEHH, on view in the Biennial, Jackson has carefully worked an elaborately decorative frame that holds neither artwork nor mirror and bizarrely seems to regurgitate strands of leather from an orifice near its top.

Jackson’s three other sculptures included in the Biennial, like much of her work, are inspired by the landscape around us; she begins with the forms of architectural details, such as cornices, combining multiple shapes and dissociating them from their original context and decorative purpose. The shapes are embedded with found images that, with close looking, reveal grandiose, unspoiled landscapes of the Western United States, taken from National Park Service and Department of Transportation webcams. The result is like an alien geode: a fractured reflection of our contemporary setting. In all of Jackson’s work, the absurdity of the combinations she creates veers toward kitsch but then burrows deeper, leaving us with an object that is uncomfortable and somehow inherently wrong.

On View
Second Floor 

Carol Jackson’s work is on view in the Museum’s second floor galleries.

Works by Carol Jackson