Patrick Jackson at François Ghebaly

From KCRW’s Art Insider, Lindsay Preston Zappas: 

At François Ghebaly, Patrick Jackson’s solo exhibition, “My Dark Architect,” has a subtleness that builds across the show into a strange effect. In the first gallery, small display shelves are made by balancing glass sheets between plexiglass spacers. On each sculpture, a different store-bought item is featured: oversized foam dice, plastic skulls, silk house plants, and metal sifters.

As I rounded the corner to the second gallery, still attempting to make meaning out of those four objects transposed together, a new set of display shelves stood waiting in the next room, this time devoid of any objects. Instead, the shelves themselves and the plexiglass spacers are bound by metal scaffolding. Absent any defining objects, the display structures feel skeletal and almost bodily — their cast reflections creating optical tricks that mimic the inner workings of one’s own mind.

Surrounding these works are screen-printed pieces on colorful grounds, each featuring a different page from the last ever printed Sears catalogue (1993): ladders, mirrors, hobby knives, basketball hoops, pots and pans.

Throughout Jackson’s show, objects oscillate between mass-produced/ impersonal to highly specific stand-ins for personhood, pointing to the fact that objects, just like our daily realities, are open-ended and responsive to multiple interpretations.