Gallery Jeeum is pleased to present CANALS, our first exhibition with Tyler Jackson Pritchard showcasing the artist’s latest series of 11 works. This series of paintings from 2020 explores how two seemingly contradictory forces work in tandem. Humans and the natural world are often depicted as opposing forces whereas Jackson takes a different point of view, seeing them as partners in a dance. Complementary to one another. Not a dissonance but a harmony.

Canals is the most fitting analogy denoting the relationship between the workings of nature and that of our society. The natural and the human world, to the artist, are one in the same, both expressions of organic energy, not antithesis. Just as how a river flows through canals built by humans, the same force runs through our organically built bodies. This channel of momentum is the main guiding principle of the works. We labour as part of and evolve along with the happenings in nature, not in opposition or in battle.

We see this communicated not just in the content of the works but also in the techniques used to make them. Flat, rigid and almost dry application of paint is placed within the same canvas as thick, three dimensional, highly textured carved acrylic applied through a wet and flowing process. The sculpture-like texture created by generous swaths of paint that are then carved are a depiction of Jackson’s unbounded emotional expressions while the almost matter-of-fact straight lines elude to an air of calm rationality. The emotional juxtaposition involved in the creation process parallels the coexistence of the organic reaction and measured construction.

Each of Jackson’s works he sees as an individual, created with full personality and purpose including both darkness and light. Photography and music from heavy metal to classical have played important roles in Jackson’s life. His paintings are the combination of the captured moment expressed in visual rhythm.

While darkness and the ‘Jungian Shadow’ have always been elements in his artistic practices; “darkness reveals light” as he says, and vice versa; we see a more daring use of bright and joyous colours seemingly to illustrate blossoming plants and flowers that are then counter balanced with the use of uniform lines. But is what you see with the naked eye genuinely all of it? What images and objects do you really see between the lines?

Jackson also reflected upon his unintentional tendency to create works in pairs or more. Good Morning, Good Afternoon and Good Night form a story-like trio and in the pair The InBetween and Ghost of the Present we see reminiscent advancements from his previous series focusing on liner optics. In Blood Ivory and Jodorowsky‘s Wounds we see the artist pushing geometric order and controlled chaos past the content of the paintings into even the shape and construction of the canvas.