Sam Jackson | Collaborators | 15 July – Sunday 25 July 2021

 

CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is delighted to announce Sam Jackson’s extensive one person exhibition ‘Collaborators’ at 28 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London.

In this exhibition Jackson presents us with a magnum opus—almost fifty portraits of people with whom he has collaborated during his fifteen-year career: curators, gallerists, writers, tutors, photographers, filmmakers, fashion designers, event organisers, artists and collectors; for example, Edward Lucie-Smith, Glen Luchford, Paul Gorman, Giles Deacon, Sacha Craddock, Kay Saatchi, Derek Ridgers, Paul Bayley, Christine Coulson, Darryl de Prez and Guinevere van Seenus. Additionally, the exhibition will include a collaborative diptych with artist, musician and Radio 1 DJ Daniel P. Carter, where each artist has alternately worked on a portrait of the other.  

Jackson is well known for his paintings of anonymous subjects who have been adorned or defaced with signs and symbols; frenetically scrawled text; and roughly hewn graffiti that doubles as tattoo. But here we are offered subjects who we might know or know of—cultural influencers who shape the things that we see, read or hear, whether discreetly or directly. Jackson interviewed each subject to draw out their own cultural influences—literature or songs, for example, which have a meaningful personal resonance—and this in turn informs the text that he deploys. In 2019 Graham Crowley—artist, writer, curator, tutor and a subject in this exhibition—stated:

“Whenever I reflect on Sam Jackson’s work there’s something tantalisingly insoluble – strange to say – but I’m never quite sure if I’ve dreamt them. An infectious form of collective amnesia perhaps?”

But in this exhibition Jackson explores something closer to collective memory. As well as exploring shared influences and stored memories, he is keen to emphasise the meaningful nature of collaborating and meditates on the process and the interactions within the ‘painter’s journey’:

“Conversations could stop and begin again with periods of time between them. I often think about how life continues and these pockets of shared encounters—sometimes brief, sometimes profound—have all in some way shaped my outlook on my painting and my life as a painter. And how I sit within these varying worlds—the artworld, art school, writers, collectors, curators, family and friends”.

 

There is always a diaristic element to Jackson’s work and it is often unclear whether his disruptive, written outpourings are biographical or autobiographical. Being so redolently informed by personal encounters and exchanges, this collection might represent Jackson’s most authentic synthesis of self and other to date.