Biography:
I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. I hold a BA in Art & The History of Art from Amherst College and a MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. I currently teach in a tenure-track role at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My position title is Assistant Professor of Photography: Race, Representation, and Critical Practice. In this role I teach undergraduate students and serve as core faculty in the newly formed Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program.
Artist Statement:
My photography engages historic Black memory through objects, landscape, and portraiture. My practice is a visual exploration of haunting. For five years I photographed within the preserved spaces of my ancestors and fictive kin; African, European, and Indigenous peoples who collided in 17th century New England. My recent work has shifted to an object focused study of commemorative spaces nationally.
My method is built through a combination of photographic documentation and critical fabulation, coined by cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, as a wrestling of facts and silences to “imagine what cannot be verified ... and to reckon with the precarious lives [of the enslaved] which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance.” (Hartman, Venus In Two Acts, 2008)
I retouch the homes, workplaces, and landscape of my ancestors and living family to showcase the recursive nature of time. I investigate the afterlife of slavery through the somatic and haptic quality of the photograph. I work with, through, and for Blackness to rupture silences enforced by colonial archives.
Contact:
Email: jjacks11(at)ucsc.edu
Instagram: @_jmjackson