Radiant City, Twice Removed

Radiant city, twice removed: Toronto's tower neighborhoods, aesthetically considered

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University

Conference Room, 61 Kirkland Street, Cambridge

Jesse Colin Jackson is a Canadian artist based in Southern California. His practice focuses on object- and image-making as alternative modes of architectural production, appropriating and manipulating the images, forms, and conceptual apparatus found in the human landscape. Jackson has received project funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Centre for Innovation in Information Visualization and Data Driven Design, the Digital Media Research and Innovation Institute, and the Ontario Arts Council. He is a 2014 Hellman Fellow at the University of California, and was a 2008 Howarth-Wright Fellow at the University of Toronto. Jackson is an assistant professor in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine; he taught previously at the University of Toronto and OCAD University. Jesse Colin Jackson is represented by Pari Nadimi Gallery in Toronto. His most recent solo show received a full-page review in The Globe and Mail.

Jesse Colin Jackson has been generating representations of Toronto’s tower neighborhoods since 2006. Jackson’s images evoke the designed and lived intensities of Toronto’s tower apartments, and their ubiquity and significance to the city. Frequently employed by policy makers and design professionals, Jackson’s images are integral to ongoing efforts to revitalize these buildings. Close examination of Jackson’s work, however, reveals ambivalence towards this progressive project in the face of the complexities these structures embody: arrival destinations for incoming immigrant populations, essential housing for one quarter of the city’s population, the decaying location of much of Toronto’s urban poverty, products of modern ideologies gone awry, and locations of past glory, current dynamism, and future potential. In this talk, Jackson will invite us to consider these conflicted sites and how their evolving presence in Toronto’s collective consciousness has been impacted by his image-making practice.