Overview
Pilar Corrias is delighted to present Silent Alarm, a solo exhibition of new mixed media paintings by American artist Tomashi Jackson.
On the occasion of her first exhibition with the gallery, the artist debuts a body of work that traces a constellation of historic events that took place in Los Angeles and London over nearly a century, examining the underlying connections between riots, patterns of systemic oppression, and community sound systems.
Pilar Corrias is delighted to present Silent Alarm, a solo exhibition of new mixed media paintings by American artist Tomashi Jackson.
On the occasion of her first exhibition with the gallery, the artist debuts a body of work that traces a constellation of historic events that took place in Los Angeles and London over nearly a century, examining the underlying connections between riots, patterns of systemic oppression, and community sound systems.
The exhibition borrows its title from Bloc Party’s 2005 debut album. Written during the early years of the Iraq war, the British band has stated that the record responds to the profound sense of hopelessness and apathy felt amongst youth at the time. For Jackson, the sound system is an open category that includes sonic art forms, venues and methods of self-organisation used by communities who are disproportionate targets for over-policing and abuses of power. Modes of the sound system include: indoor and outdoor speaker components for projecting audio, festivals, dancehalls, clubs, open mics, drum circles, house parties, and spaces for gathering and enjoyment.
Ostensibly intended to preserve specific notions of civic order, the policing of noise can eventually inspire overt, political acts of resistance and rebellion. Loudness – through noise, music or even fashion – is almost always equated with antisocial behaviour and non-assimilation. In Silent Alarm, Jackson asks which communities and gatherings are considered ‘too loud’, and thus deemed a threat to social stability?
In her new paintings, Jackson visualises correlations between several historic Los Angeles- and London-based events, informed by archival research, first-person interviews, and her personal memories. These include layered stills from news coverage and documentaries on uprisings sparked by police violence and demonstrations for educational access that were met with excessive force, such as: the 1965 Watts Rebellion; the 1968 L.A. Chicano Student Walkouts, the UK Black Education Movement of the 1960s and 70s, 1992 L.A. Riots, which were precipitated by the acquittal of LAPD officers who were filmed beating unarmed motorist Rodney King, and the killing of Latasha Harlins in 1991; the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival; the public response to the 1981 New Cross Fire; the UK student demonstrations in 2010; and the uprisings that followed the killing of unarmed Mark Duggan by London police in 2011. Jackson also activates imagery relating to the sounds of the communities in focus, including Jazz and Blues from the 1950s, Freestyle Hip-Hop from the '90s, Calypso from the '70s, and Grime from the 2010s.
The paintings are mostly constructed from textiles collected from the two cities; white poplin, white linen, white canvas, brown corduroy and houndstooth wool from London’s Goldhawk Road, and denim from the Garment District of Downtown Los Angeles. Throughout, fabrics are embedded with pastes mixed from quarried stone dusts (marble, slate, and China clay), soil, and burned palm tree ash, gathered from specific sites in England and the United States. The Los Angeles palm ash references Jackson’s own experience as a twelve-year-old during the 1992 L.A. Uprising, when fires burned and ash rained across the city for four consecutive days.
Policing The Crisis (Los Angeles Uprising 1992/ London Uprising 2011/ LAPD raid on Project Blowed 1996) (2024) takes its primary title from Stuart Hall’s edited collection of essays, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978). In this richly textured work, white canvas, brown corduroy and raw canvas are sutured by a zigzag of blue denim; brass grommet rings and laminated paper bag handles are employed to stretch the painting tightly across an awning style frame constructed from locally sourced London wood. The artist’s personal connection to the earthen materials she uses – including ash and soil from L.A., marble from the Colorado mountain site of the Lincoln Memorial excavation, to the slate and China clay dust collected from the Exeter coast during a research trip – investigates how generational narratives of people, place and uprising imbue matter, objects and settings with meaning that defies distance.
On 7 March 2024, Pilar Corrias hosted an open discussion with the artist Tomashi Jackson on the underlying connections between riots, patterns of systematic oppression and community sound systems. Jackson was joined by Lisa Anderson, Managing Director, Black Cultural Archives; Nia K. Evans, Executive Director of the Boston Ujima Project; Gordon Moakes, musician, writer, and former member of Bloc Party; and Tim Newburn, Professor of Criminology and Social Policy at LSE.
