AYANA V. JACKSON | FISSURE

Curated by Bonnie Rubenstein

May 1 – June 2
Campbell House Museum
160 Queen St W, Toronto

Employing her own body, Ayana V. Jackson deconstructs racial and gender stereotypes to create contemporary portraits laced with historical allusions. Deeply influenced by her own fluid identity and her transcontinental practice—working between New York, Paris, and Johannesburg—Jackson’s images crystallize African and African-diasporic realities while challenging a fraught legacy of pictorial representation.

Built in 1822, Campbell House Museum was the former home of Chief Justice Sir William Campbell and his wife, Hannah. With Fissure, Jackson’s work activates the site, invoking the specter of both 19th-century and current-day cultural and class realities. Works from her series Dear Sarah (2016) and Intimate Justice in the Stolen Moment (2017) are presented throughout the house, set against its period décor. Jackson’s lush, contemplative portraits convey subtle acts of resistance and self-empowerment—quiet moments of relaxation and intimate shared touch, and the expression of joyous freedom. The works confront the viewer in the present—a moment still charged with the legacy of colonial racism. Sharing walls with historical portraits of the Campbells, Jackson’s photographs provide a sensitive counterpoint, prompting conversation about representations of Blackness and shifting identities. The work brings the past to life with a charged presence and a poetic gesture of defiant freedom, toward a hopeful future.

Fissure is organized by CONTACT and presented in partnership with Campbell House Museum. Presenting partner Wedge Curatorial Projects.

Ayana V. Jackson, Installation view of Fissure, Campbell House Museum, Toronto, May 1 - June 2, 2019. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy CONTACT, the artist, and Galerie Baudoin Lebon

Artist Biography
Ayana V. Jackson’s work examines the complexities of photographic representation and the role of the camera in constructing identity. Using performance and studio-based portraiture, her practice can be seen as a map of the ethical considerations and relationships involved between the photographer, subject and viewer. With a particular interest in the 19th and early 20th century representation of black bodies, Jackson steps into the world of her reference materials as a way to question the role the history of photography and fine art have played in the construction of race and gender stereotypes.

Jackson was awarded the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in 2018; the National Black Arts Festival’s 2017 Fine Art and Fashion Award; and the 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Photography. She is represented by Galerie Baudoin Lebon (Paris) and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago), and has exhibited with Gallery MOMO (Johannesburg), Primo Marella Gallery (Milan), Galerie Sho Contemporary (Tokyo), the San Francisco Mexican Museum, Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art (MoCADA), and the Philadelphia African American Museum. Jackson has received grants from the Marguerite Casey Foundation and the French Institute. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including the catalogues Poverty Pornography & Archival Impulse (2013) and African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth (2006) and the academic journals n.paradoxa, Art South Africa, Art + Auction, Camera Austria, Afrique in Visu, Proximo Futuro/Next Future and ZAM magazine.