Jesse Colin Jackson, from Skip Stop Facade: Domesticity, Inkjet Print, 2019
April 25 - June 15, 2019
* Extended until July 20, 2019
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 25, 6- 8pm
Pari Nadimi Gallery is pleased to present Skip Stop a solo exhibition by Jesse Colin Jackson.
Skip Stop invites us to consider the rise and fall of the five towers of Regent Park South. These award-winning structures and their fast‐living architect Peter Dickinson are the apogee of mid‐century modern architecture in Canada. Titled after the architectural curiosity that organizes the towers’ design—maximally efficient “skip‐stop” corridors, permitting two‐storey units that front onto both sides—the work featured depicts the depleted energies present in these buildings immediately prior to their demolition.
Skip Stop Facade is a series of eight triptychs depicting interior spaces and details of 14 Blevins Place, the last tower left standing. The building was still partially occupied at the time the images were captured, one month before its demolition began in August 2014. The final compositions have been processed from memory nearly five years later. As arranged for the exhibition, the images reconstitute the building’s skip-stop arrangement of exterior windows.
Skip Stop Site Plan is a digital video that juxtaposes two views from above at different scales. The first view depicts the tiled floor details that marked the Regent Park South tower elevator landings—on floors 3, 6, 7, 10 and 13 only, requiring residents of other floors to access their units via stairs. The second view depicts 13 years of Regent Park demolition and new construction, 2005–2018.
Skip Stop 2019 is a series of images captured and processed immediately prior to the exhibition, in order to register the current state of Regent Park’s ongoing process of change. A central tenet of the redevelopment plan is to reconnect the street grid: the resurrection of Oak Street, immortalized in the 1953 National Film Board production Farewell Oak Street, bisects the first image. The second image depicts the former Regent Park South site, with new towers in place of the old, while the third image depicts the opposite corner and condition of Regent Park during a pause in demolition.
Also on view are the most recent completed Iterations, a collaborative project with Toronto-based media artist Tori Foster. Iterations (2009-2019) are panoramic images of familiar built forms and their surrounding environments, in which consistent elements are reinforced through repetition, while the unique circumstances of each site create visual interference. Each image uses one of the two historic Regent Park building types as its subject; both were both captured ten times between 2010 and 2013. As with Skip Stop Facade, the final processing took place years later, as the demolished sites were fading from city memory.
Jesse Colin Jackson is a Canadian artist based in Southern California. His creative practice focuses on object- and image-making as alternative modes of architectural production, manipulating the forms and ideas found in virtual and built environments through the expressive opportunities provided by digital visualization and fabrication technologies. His interactive Marching Cubes installations (2016—present) have been featured in Toronto, Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles, Tehran, and Stockholm. Prior solo and two-exhibitions include Radiant City (Pari Nadimi Gallery, 2014), Automatic/Revisited (Latitude 44, 2013), Figure Ground (Gladstone Gallery, 2011), Iterations (Arepa, 2010), Usonia Road (Larry Wayne Richards Gallery, 2009), and West Lodge (Convenience Gallery, 2009). Jackson has received project funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, the Centre for Innovation in Information Visualization and Data Driven Design, and the Digital Media Research and Innovation Institute, He was a 2014-2015 Hellman Fellow at the University of California, and a 2008-2010 Howarth-Wright Fellow at the University of Toronto. Jackson is Associate Professor of Electronic Art & Design at the University of California, Irvine. He taught previously at OCAD University and the University of Toronto.
For press and other inquiries, please contact Pari Nadimi Gallery at (416) 591-6464 or via email at info@parinadimigallery.com