"Fury" by Lauren JAckson
"In her accordion folded, oversized artist’s book Fury, artist and educator Lauren Jackson effectively employs the graphic potential of the silkscreen medium, with its origins in commercial sign printing and advertising posters, to boldly challenge and confront the viewer. Fury belongs to a body of work based on oral histories the artist conducted about the Black women educators in her family. She sees the works as “emphasizing the value of education in Black communities.” In a series of paired monochromatic scenes that unfold in a visual dialogue across ten pages, Jackson addresses issues of gender inequality, Black identity and climate change.
The book plays with flattened form and positive/ negative imagery in increasingly disturbing, photographic images combined with stenciled shapes. The stark, black and white views begin with water drops falling into a turbulent ocean followed by cloud formations. They are layered behind a scrim of halftone dots which plays conceptually with the silkscreen medium itself. This mesh effect transforms in the following pages into a menacing white net which surrounds the silhouetted figure of a child. A pair of disembodied hands beside the net appear to have released the child alone into the world. She is seen running and growing larger in the following pages. There, a young woman’s head in silhouette faces a delineated “page” dated 2012 to 2016 with the words “The essence of proving yourself for the sake of education is deafening and demoralizing.” These words are accompanied by a crouching, headless body superimposed over the ocean, titled “With all her FURY.” The final pages show a close-up, cropped view of a car crash and the repeated profile head against ocean waves, which ends the narrative where it began, implying a relentless cycle of repetition.
This oversized book with black and white silkscreen photographs resonant with newspaper imagery, silhouettes and bold graphics, engages viewers in its scale and immediacy. The black forms against a monochromatic range of halftone images convey the threatening forces of nature together with a narrative of race and identity through the accomplished interplay of repetition, juxtaposition, and technique."
-LuLen Walker, Art Curator at Georgetown University and juror for best work on paper
