What It Is

Gallery hours

Sa&Su: 10 am–6 pm

Complications from eye surgeries and corrective lenses to alleviate a condition known as strabismus have misaligned the speed at which artist Dan Jackson perceives colour frequencies. This brain-eye disconnect has resulted in an overcorrected sense of three-dimensional space. Prompted by these side effects, Jackson set out to explore how colour informs and transforms objects and space.

In his new series What It Is (2019), Jackson applies frenetic, celebratory colour to photos of largely monochromatic industrial spaces to strip away their context and understood purpose. Though there were options for mechanizing the production of these images, Jackson chose instead to painstakingly hand trace and digitally colour each object, enabling human consciousness to intervene in the manufacturing process.

Transforming these utilitarian environments into surreal landscapes, Jackson offers a fictional, decorative world where multiple colour frequencies and fragments of time are presented simultaneously.

The large-scale, detailed photos encourage the viewer to engage with the work up close. But doing so becomes an act of entropy, where viewers themselves initiate their collapse into disorder.

What It Is offers a fresh, philosophical, and interpretive use of colour that blurs the line between representation and abstraction and challenges the perception of photography as a system of documentation.

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.