Carol Jackson
Artist, in conversation with Anthony Elms, Assistant Director of Gallery 400
Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Carol Jackson's signs, sculptures, gouaches and drawings use common, everyday "signatureless" styles to let loose the grandiose morality within the picturesque languages and visuals of advertising. Her work is a bitterly humorous send up of the demands and promises commercial representations make for goods, be they detergent, food, or real estate. Long focusing on a series of meticulously hand-tooled leather reworkings of both store advertising and real estate development signage, Jackson replaces the found text with disdainful, mistrustful and self-deprecating thoughts that sales language represses. What remains is the epic longing and promissory nature of the address.

Jackson's self-titled exhibition, on view at Gallery 400 August 28th - October 6th, includes new works on several different types of media. Her recent exhibitions include group exhibitions at the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, and the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, and solo exhibitions at Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, and Changing Role-Move Over Gallery, Naples, Italy. Jackson received an Artadia Individual Artist Grant in 2002 and a Roger Brown Residency from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006.