Tomashi Jackson’s multimedia practice places formal and material investigations in dialogue with recent histories of displacement and disenfranchisement. Drawing centrally from Josef Albers’ research on the relativity of color and the unconscious processes by which the brain organizes and reconciles information, Jackson’s work incorporates images hand-painted from photographs and materials chosen for their relevance into graphic geometric compositions that raise probing philosophical questions.

The body of work that Jackson created for Forever My Lady, her solo exhibition presented at Night Gallery in January 2020, emerged out of a residency in Athens, Greece, the birthplace of democracy. Here Jackson embarked upon an investigation of the material and philosophical history of democracy, comparing its origins to the realities of the present-day United States. The works in Forever My Lady trace these histories through strategic use of material, including ephemera from recent contested elections in the US and recent ballot materials from Greece, and through overlapping imagery which crosshatch photographs from seemingly disparate historical events as well as pictures from her own family archives. Taken altogether, these composite images connect moments from collective memory to personal histories. As the artist summarizes, “I use archival photos from the deep past or the contemporary internet, or from my family’s archives of photographs, to collapse the past with the present [...] and create scenes that produce an echo through time.” Mounted on wedge-like frames that protrude at right angles from the wall, the works become sculptural, suggesting metropolitan space as it defines our notions of society and community.