Aryel René Jackson and I first met in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, where they were in Print and Transmedia. When I walked into Aryel’s Ivester show, Resonant Landscapes: Sci-Fi Narratives and Historical Echoes, the first thing I noticed was the video installation of three vertical screens, framed in a mixed media sculpture to resemble windows in the interior of an airplane. The video work was an aerial shot of the plane flying over landscape, lush, green, filled with streams, and no clear signs of human inhabitation. As I kept looking at the show, figures appeared in various paintings, engaged in what seemed like moments of care. I was particularly struck by a painting of a man playing music to the world, and another where the world was being watered. Something about the aerial viewpoint in several of the paintings reminded me of the time I saw the International Space Station fly overhead as I was standing in the front yard at night — humbled, amazed, and hopeful thinking about human consciousness elsewhere and the possibility that carried. Aryel is currently an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts. The following is an edited and condensed conversation with Aryel René Jackson.
Renee Lai (RL): Aryel, you and I have known each other a long time! I visited your studio with my undergraduates back in May as you were preparing for this show. I remember talking about color, the role of doubt in the studio, and getting back into painting. I also saw some of your small 2D work in your last Ivester Contemporary project space show and your big installation at The Contemporary which reappeared in this show as the background for Turbulent Passage. Can we talk about risk-taking and the switch to 2D?
Aryel René Jackson (ARJ): Let me start with the 2D question first. I grew up in New Orleans where I attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts high school. I was obsessed with painting. When I went to Cooper Union afterward, I was told that my colors were too bright, so I no longer saw the purpose of painting for what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to explore motion, and it felt like the easiest way for me to do that was to dive into video and animation. When I was at UT for graduate school, I was still making paintings, but I wasn’t including them in my critiques. I actually tried to show a series of panels around the time when the pandemic hit, and we had to cancel the show. When Kevin (Ivester) did a studio visit, I had some panels up on the wall, and he said, “I like that.”
I think of risk-taking as troubleshooting. Most of my education and career is in video, and because of technology, you’re constantly having to troubleshoot. I have a producer mindset, meaning that whatever it is I’m trying to incorporate into my practice, I do it myself before delegating to an assistant. I expect that I’ll mess up, and I will employ it in the work, and then another issue will show up.
RL: I like the word “troubleshooting” because it feels less emotionally fraught than the word doubt, which is the word I tend to use. You and I have been talking a lot about doubt recently, whether or not it’s a good or bad thing in the work.
ARJ: I was just talking to another artist here at Bemis about history, archaeology, and science. We’ve always assumed what we found out was right until things get disproven. The only way that we find out we were wrong is because somebody had doubt. I’m interested in archaeology and science because they embrace the doubt as a sign to revisit. I feel like what I’ve come up against as an artist is this idea that I have to know exactly what’s going on all the time. I feel like that’s not the way the arts work. All three fields — archaeology, science, and art — require immense imagination. The work becomes refined as people continue to doubt, revisit, and imagine.
RL: Doubt can function as an opening, a positive tool for curiosity and re-exploration.
ARJ: Before Pope L. passed, he did an interview with the Louisiana Channel where they asked him what he would say to young artists. He said to be patient and become comfortable recognizing that you don’t know everything. Sometimes what you’re making is not as good as you think it is, and that’s okay, you know? It’s about the growth. I think doubt is important. Doubt is useful because it allows for all of that re-imagining.
RL: I remember seeing some flat collages that I really liked when we visited your studio. Everything looks so different now at Ivester, with much more layering of material. The surfaces are very built up. It ties in nicely with the textures we see in Turbulent Passage and the sculpture Buried Signals in the middle of the gallery. Can you talk about your affinity for texture and how you make some of these material choices?
ARJ: Texture feels like a by-product of wanting to use certain landscaping materials. I’ve often been asked where my soil is from, and I’m interested in that conversation about origin. This type of soil exists in parts of Texas, but there are soils that match this in West Africa. A lot of topsoil is very poisoned. My family knows this because we lived in the middle of a rice field. My parents were rice farmers, and they were unable to keep the land and had to sell. The family friend who bought the land owned a plane-fertilizing business. When they flew over the field fertilizing, they weren’t necessarily making sure it didn’t coat our entire yard. The fertilizers stay in the topsoil.
I wouldn’t want to label my use of texture as meaning anything specific. I’m more interested in the associations people draw when they see the material, like that color of topsoil versus another color of topsoil.
I’m always trying to figure out how to disrupt something. It often happens with rough texture against smooth. For me, it’s about how in a welcoming place, we would embrace constant change for the better. There has to be some kind of discomfort. There is this idea that a space can either be all smooth and clean or encrusted and lived in. Merging those two spaces together ends up tickling a part of the brain.
RL: I feel that disruption you’re talking about, particularly in the ways that the dirt in some of the paintings functions as background, surface, and skin all at once. The figures remind me of stepping out onto the beach when you’re wet, and how you become encrusted with sand. I also thought of Greek mythology. There’s a story where Apollo is chasing a nymph, Daphne, and she cries out to her father for help. Her father turns her into a tree to save her. I had an illustrated book of this story when I was a child, and I clearly remember an illustration where her skin was covered with bark mid-transformation.
ARJ: Yes, I think it’s related in some way. There are definitely things that repeat through time, like the fact that we are nature, nature is us. What you brought up is great because, for me, that’s thinking about specters. Specters in the land, and the lives that were not documented. Everywhere I go I think about who was here, and how far down they were. Topsoil contains history as it builds up; however, concrete puts a cap on that. There is pumice in some of the work, and maybe some — but not a lot — of cement patches. The cement patch is acrylic-based, but I haven’t quite figured out how to seal it in a way that I like. So, pumice has been nice because it’s rough, and it feels more positive than cement. It’s more like exfoliation, whereas cement feels like it’s suffocating. In this new work, I’m responding to what a welcoming place looks like, taking seriously the prompt I gave other people and myself. I have to take my time and assess what different connotations come with each material.
RL: I wanted to talk about the theme of travel or alternate worlds. I picked up on it right away from the video installation, Turbulent Passage, which resembles the view from the interior of an airplane. The audio from that piece put me into a very extraterrestrial state of mind — all the beeping and booping. In many of the paintings, it felt like the earth was there but miniaturized; the figures were pouring water on the earth or playing music to it. Some of the smaller paintings felt like windstorms or water currents. It made me wonder whether the show looks forward to places we are traveling to, or if it is about what we are leaving behind and traveling from.
ARJ: Every time I have an exhibition, my goal is for it to help me continue the work. I consider these paintings to be nonlinear storyboards. They are moments in a possible narrative. There is no set narrative of before or after. What you said is an interesting question that I’d want you to answer.
RL: I felt like I was leaving behind. I think that comes from the sculptural element in the show of the rooftop. The sculpture looks like the top four-fifths of a house, mostly the framing of the roof, with dirt at the edges. It made me think of climate disasters like the Dust Bowl, which brings us back to our earlier topsoil discussion. Because the house is slanted, it also made me think of flooding. I’m from Houston, so I’ve seen images after hurricanes of people on roofs, on the tops of houses peeking out over flooded areas. I thought that the house sculpture indicated something that I was leaving behind.
ARJ: I get that. The house has been haunting me ever since Hurricane Katrina. I love that you said the house makes the cement floor feel like water. I think my goal is to put the viewer in a surreal space. I think surrealism allows us to take a break from reality while still engaging with it. You take away from it based on what you relate to.
I realized that I needed to take my time through video. I thought, how can I break this down even more and show what’s going on behind the camera as opposed to making this predetermined clear narrative? I feel like I’m having a beef with history as a malleable thing.
Another artist here [at Bemis] was like, “Yeah, history is malleable, and it becomes terrible in the wrong person’s hands,” or something like that. That’s an interesting tension because, Black Americans and Creoles, had to create a whole new identity and world in the Americas. Worlds really depend on who is making it.
RL: Do you feel like you’re in conversation with yourself from show to show?
ARJ: Absolutely, but not just that — I’m in conversation with the various archives I’ve collected. I’ve collected fabric from West Africa, from my grandmother, from when I was in New York. I keep this stuff with me. I keep scraps from printmaking images. Even though they are abstracted, they come from a real source—I’m trying to identify aspects of both cultures that I come from: Black American and Louisiana Creole.
RL: That brings me to my last question. I was wondering where the images come from in your mixed-media panels. I can tell that some of them might be from photographs, and I see images of grass and people. How do you source these images and what importance do they have for you?
ARJ: The piece We Are Skybound has an image applied onto a panel that I worked on top of. It’s an image of WWII Tuskegee pilots in front of a parachute room from 1945. As I worked on it I was thinking about how during the fight for integration my Nana could not attend the same medical certification classes as the white nurses. She had to leave Richmond, Virginia, and go to New York to take classes. Her cohort had to self-educate because they couldn’t study with the white students. They would record all these things that they needed to know for their tests, and she could go into this room, put on one of the reels, and study that way. Black Tuskegee pilots were not allowed to train with white pilots, so if you wanted to be a pilot and you were Black, you would go to Tuskegee University. They had self-trained pilots there who then trained these pilots. I’ve been seeking out moments in history where people had to develop a technology to get around segregation. I’m very loose with the word “technology” because there’s technology as a craft, and then there’s technology as exploitation in terms of materials.
I made a rule for myself that the size of the image should depict my relationship to it, in the sense of ownership. The painting We Are Skybound and a few others are small because they come from archived images. The larger ones are just me. Size has been helpful as a way to be respectful of origins but also be honest about how they impact me.
Resonant Landscapes: Sci-Fi Narratives and Historical Echoes is on view through Oct. 12, 2024, at Ivester Contemporary.
You can learn more about the show here.