Ariel René Jackson presents the New York premiere of their latest moving image work, A Welcoming Place, along with the single-channel videos Bentonville Forecast: In the Square (2019) and Descendance (2021).
Jackson’s anti-disciplinary practice considers land and landscape as sites of personal representation. Jackson probes the civic and social ideas that surround familiar artifacts of labor and public life, often incorporating antique farming tools, educational instruments, domestic furniture, and even weather balloons into their work across different mediums. Born in Louisiana and raised by a maternal family descending from generations of farmers, Jackson makes work that draws heavily upon the experiences of their Southern, Black Creole upbringing. Jackson’s work offers a reminder that history and public memory are far from immutable truths, but rather represent speculative practices comprised of equal parts doubt and imagination.
In A Welcoming Place, the artist offers a poetic rumination on place and belonging in Austin, Texas, where Jackson has lived and worked since 2017. The work comprises a series of six conversations with Black, Brown, and Indigenous Austinites. The subjects’ recorded reflections are layered with found footage of US and British weather balloon systems, archival documentation of Black and Brown residents, and new footage shot primarily in West, South, and East Austin on sites of former Freedman communities, where Jackson holds and transports a large black weather balloon through various public sites. The resulting patchwork of imagery and oral accounts conveys a collective, embodied history of Austin’s recent rapid gentrification and ongoing racist past.
Bentonville Forecast: In the Square. 2019. USA. Directed by Ariel René Jackson. Single-channel video. 4 min.
Descendance. 2021. USA. Directed by Ariel René Jackson. Single-channel film. 5 min.
A Welcoming Place. 2020-22. USA. Directed by Ariel René Jackson. Single-channel film. 30 min.