Jonathan Mark Jackson

Rememory

I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan and currently reside in Providence, Rhode Island. I received my Bachelors of Art (Studio Art and Art History) from Amherst College, and am currently finalizing my Masters of Fine Art in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. At its core, my work engages with historical facts through objects, landscape, and the human form. Through the combination of photographs, sound, and language, I call attention to the forces that shape Black American historic consciousness. I am following in the methodological and aesthetic lineage of artists working at the intersection of documentary practice and “critical fabulation”, namely: Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson. As well as cultural and media scholars Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, and Kevin Quashie. The included works within this digital exhibition showcase my dialectical approach of figuring historical memory, and the afterlife of slavery, as a phantom; existing interstitially between the past and present.

The works within the portfolio Rememory, reference Toni Morrison's original formation of the term in Beloved (1987). Following her narrative definition, my photographs perform the psychological action of retouching forgotten memories and placing them into a narrated image sequence. This research based practice takes me to the preserved homes and workplaces of my ancestors and fictive kin; African, European, and Indigenous peoples who collided around the port towns of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. As I move through the region, I search for and "inhabit" homes that claim a Black history, challenging the imperatives of traditional preservation. This regional tradition shrouds the complex violence of the nation's beginning. Through still photography, my work restages the home to showcase the paradoxical dilemma of historical preservation. In each space, I enter an exercise of listening and slow looking, mediated through the large format camera. The photographs beckon and activate the sonic realm of quiet. Like Morrison, “I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the new world - without the mandate for conquest.” (Morrison, Playing In the Dark, 15.) The work is a structural haunting. I rely on the somatic qualities of the photograph to produce an experiential understanding of how historical narrative is constructed, what powers are at play within the narrative, and how Blackness ruptures silences enforced by the archive.