BCA Fall Exhibitions 2020: Akiko Jackson Gallery Guide

Unprecedented?, BCA Center installation view, 2020

A KI KO JACKSON A RTIST FOCU S

sometimes I recall our hair grows after death, 2019 sculptural drawing: synthetic hair, sheep hair, fasteners 168" x 72" x 2" NFS In the past few years I’ve experienced incredible pain witnessing the death of my last grandparent. Being alone during another’s death is a difficult experience we never learn how to digest nor explain. The shock, the panic, the uncertainty, completely flood your entire self.

This seemed to release a butterfly effect, as I experienced the deaths of dear friends, 20 years my senior, both too soon, both artists, both women, both of cancer. I have found that grief, pain, the ongoing mourning – they never leave the body and it takes an emotional and physical toll on ourselves. And yet, we are expected to carry on and not burden others to avoid discomfort. Why? I find this conflicted societal construct antithetical to healing.

- Akiko Jackson

Akiko Jackson (b. Kahuku, HI) is a multi-disciplinary visual artist who conceptualizes her practice through sculpture, installation, and research.

In particular, she employs the absence of the body as a launching point for deeper discussions on cultural identity.

In sometimes I recall our hair grows after death, Jackson combines the language of abstraction with the simplicity of natural and synthetic materials to create a sculptural wall drawing – one that specifically references familial memory, displacement, and ancestral mourning. Weaving fibers and wet-stomping wool, she creates a figurative language that relates hair to body, and body to identity as a means to commemorate the process of mourning.

The title sometimes I recall our hair grows after death, is a quote from the last stanza of Dreaming of Hair by Li-Young Lee (b. 1957, Jakarta, Indonesia), one of the leading poetic voices of the Chinese diaspora writing in America. In the poem, Li-Young uses the metaphor of hair to symbolize the fleeting nature of life, and the spiritual and physical connection between the poet and his father.

Jackson alludes to Li-Young’s poem to suggest themes of grief and family, while also creating space for viewers to consider their personal experience of loss within the context of social events that have defined our lives this past year.

neckbones, 2019 cast resin 15' x 3' x 3' NFS With the onset of the pandemic, it has become ever so apparent that marginalized black and brown bodies are the most negatively and unjustly impacted in our society. This fact in particular is not an unprecedented moment in history – it has compounded into a deep-rooted cancer to the point of incredible mass sorrow.

I believe this chronic mass sorrow is an unprecedented reality, affecting society physically and psychologically. It is a result of an increased awareness that life can be taken in an instant; and the inability to be together, work together, cry together. How do we mourn silently, alone, and distanced?

I believe this incredible pain that occurs through the witnessing of constant death grows within, becoming all there is of my body.

- Akiko Jackson

For neckbones, Akiko Jackson created resin reproductions of the C1 through C7 cervical spine that she repeatedly cast and strung together to convey the concept of healing. She made the work while undergoing physical therapy in an attempt to recover from an injury. The warm, translucent hue of the sculpture suggests amber, a fossilized tree resin fashioned as jewelry and also believed by many cultures (both historic and contemporary) to have therapeutic properties.

Fashioned as a sculptural body that is “suspended, elongated, stretched, and released,” neckbones becomes a symbolic expression of the healing process.

Critical to our stability and physical well-being, the spine supports our body and enables us to move freely. Metaphorically, neckbones invites viewers to reflect more deeply on their personal, as well as communal, spiritual health within the context of current events – whether the disastrous mortality rates of Covid-19, or the enduring racism and marginalization of people of color that underpins our society.

Commentary

Akiko Jackson sometimes I recall our hair grows after death The first thing that comes to mind when I experience Akiko’s work is loss, and the grief associated with it. As a nurse in an oncology unit, loss of hair, specifically. It is a natural human reaction, when confronted with a devastating cancer diagnosis, to not believe, to deny, to think that this is not happening, not to us, not to me.

Slowly and incrementally, we come to accept this new and warped reality. But nothing cements it more than the chemotherapy-induced loss of hair (and much more so for women than for men). First we lose hair in small amounts, then in big lumps; then there’s hair everywhere: on the pillows, on the bed, on the floor, on the tub. Everywhere! Until the day we wake up and say ‘Enough! Let’s get rid of it!’ Then we shave it all off. Up until this point our minds may have been able to play tricks on us. Henceforth, though, there’s no more mind games; whenever we look in the mirror, we see a different person. One we barely recognize.

And so the loss of hair, in some twisted way, equates to the loss of our own selves. That whom we were – we are no longer. We may be again, but altered.

That person we were before, will never be again. And… how do we move through life now? How do we re-configure ourselves after living so many years as that ‘other’ me. What is left of that other version of me? Aikiko’s minimalist work makes me shift away from the superfluous and onto a bare-bones and ontological kind of truth. Perhaps, the same truth that allows us to see beauty in bones…

Milton Rosa-Ortiz Staff II RN, Miller 5, Oncology, UVM Medical Center Burlington, VT

Biographies Akiko Jackson (b. Kahuku, HI) is a sculptor who holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts, Richmond and an MA from California State University, Los Angeles. Jackson’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Wing Luke Museum of Asian Pacific American Experience, Seattle; the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach; the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Los Angeles; the 4th World Ceramic Biennale Korea (CEBIKO) in Icheon Republic of Korea; and the Australian International Ceramics Triennale in Sydney. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships at the Lawrence Arts Center, Kansas; Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Newcastle; Pottery Northwest, Seattle; and was a Louise Bourgeois Endowed Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Jackson was recently a visual artist at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, New Mexico. Akiko Jackson currently resides in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Milton Rosa-Ortiz (b. 1967, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a sculptor and installation artist whose work uses matter and space to create visual allegories and capture the psyche. Rosa studied at the Technical University of Budapest, Hungary in 1989, and in 1992 at Centro Studi Santa Chiara Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy. In 1993 he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Kansas State University, Manhattan. In 1998, Rosa-Ortiz attended Anderson Ranch Arts Center (ARAC) in Snowmass Village, Colorado. In 2012, he received a Bachelor’s degree in nursing from UNY-Downstate Medical Center; Brooklyn, NY and currently works as a Staff II RN, Miller 5, Oncology, UVM Medical Center. Rosa-Ortiz is also a practicing artist. He has exhibited his work at numerous venues in the United States and abroad including the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan, Puerto Rico; the Cornell DeWitt Gallery in New York City; Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Colorado; Wave Hill Arts Center in Bronx, New York; Galerie Favardin & de Veneuil in Paris, France, and the Museo de Arte Acarigua-Araure, Venezuela. Milton Rosa-Ortiz currently resides in Burlington, Vermont.

Participating Artists Jeremy Ayers, Becci Davis, Lillie Harris, Akiko Jackson, Brielle Rovito, EveNSteve (Eve and Steve Schaub), Dan Siegel, and Sarah Camille Wilson Community Contributors Tyeastia Green, Elizabeth Goldstein, Carmen Jackson, Milton Rosa-Ortiz, and Tamara Waraschinski

Unprecedented? is presented as part of 2020 Vision: Reflecting on a World-Changing Year, a statewide exhibition initiative of the Vermont Curators Group.

Burlington City Arts is supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts through the New England Arts Resilience Fund, part of the United States Regional Arts Resilience Fund, an initiative of the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with major funding from the federal CARES Act from the National Endowment for the Arts.

2020 EXHIBITION YEAR PRESENTED BY

BCA Exhibitions are funded in part by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Vermont Arts Council.

BURLINGTON CITY ARTS 135 CHURCH STREET, BURLINGTON, VERMONT, 05401 BURLINGTONCITYARTS.ORG