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Aryel René Jackson (they/them) is a Black Afro-Creole, non-binary artist and scholar whose inter-disciplinary practice engages critically with art history, cultural identity, and the politics of representation. 

Drawing on both historical framweworks and contemporary discourse, Jackson explores how visual culture shapes and reflects societal narratives, with particular attention to marginalized voices and cross-cultural influences.

Jackson’s practice and research contributes to expanding art historical conversations beyond traditional Eurocentric boundaries, emphasizing inclusivity, critical inquiry, and the evolving role of art in shaping collective memory.  

This website presents two recent series, “Embedded Surfaces” (2024) and “Transmission” (2025), that reflect an interdisciplinary and materially driven practice. 

Embedded Surfaces applies visibility and opacity via layering of soil, archive imagery, and textile on panels built through repetition, negative space, and collage, resulting in fragmentation. Silhouettes and photographs of landscapes and historical and public figures become mingled with grids, patterns, and soil.

Transmission extends this process into printmaking and video, where works such as Re:Future combine image projection, sound, and performance to explore “call and response” as a visual and aural ritual. 

Across both series, Jackson explores speculative futures by treating soil and archival fragments as carriers of ecological memory and lived history. Their work emphasizes layering and transformation as visual forms of folding past into re-presentation. 



Archive & Exhibitions

CV 





Education
MFA, Transmedia and Print The University of Texas at Austin

BFA, Video, Photography, and Animation The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art




ExhibitionsResonant Landscapes: Sci-Fi Narratives and Historical Echoes
Ivester Contemporary, Austin, TX
2024

What it means: Iterations of a welcoming place
HOST Series, The Contemporary Austin, Jones Center, Austin, TX
2023

A Welcoming Place
Women & Their Work, Austin, TX
2022

Descendance
Jacob Lawrence Gallery
Seattle, WA
2021

Video Series
New Museum, New York, NY
2019

The Origin of the Blues
RISD Museum, Providence, RI
2017

The Blues Data Crop
Wave Hill, Bronx, NY
2016




Awards & FellowshipsJuried Time-Based The Future is a Constant Wake
ArtPrize, Grand Rapids, MI
2023

Black Spatial Relics Micro Grant
Black Spatial Relics, Philadelphia, PA
2019

Royal College Exchange Award
University of Texas at Austin, London, UK
2018







Teaching
Visiting Lecturer, The Princeton Atelier, Spring 2023, Princeton, NJ

Lecturer, Texas State University, Fall 2021-Fall 2025, San Marcos, TX

Lecturer, The University of Texas at Austin, Spring 2021





Last Updated 24.10.31
Selected Artwork





EMBEDDED SURFACES


2024
Temporal Glimpses
18x18x1.5 inches

Acrylic, Texas Topsoil, Sand, Creole Accordionist Alphonse “Bois Sec” Ardoin, Marjis Allain (Grandma), Flock, Archival Print, Cyanotype,
Self-portrait, Screenprint, Acrylic-Based Cement Patch, and Varnish on Panel.








2024
Plausible, probable,
possible, or preferred

24x24x1.5 inches

  • Acrylic,Mediums,Pumice Potting Soils,Texas
  • Topsoil, Archival Prints,“Suspended 
  • Grid,” 2018 printed on cotton.









2024
Trace Signal
36x24.5x1 inches

Acrylic, Gouache, Cement Patch, Mediums, Chocolate Loam, Potting Soil, American Zooligist, Charles Henry Turner’s “Turner Circling” or “Tournoiements de Turner”,Lyric from “Tenha Fé” (”Have Faith”) by The Originals of Samba (Os Originais do Samba).


 





2024
We are skybound
6x6x2 inches

“WWII Tuskegee Pilot in front of Parachute Room” by Toni Frissell (1945), Organza Fabric, Acrylic, Texas Topsoil, Sand, and Varnish on Panel.


 





2024
Concurrents
5x7x1.6 inches

Acrylic, Mediums, Pumice, Texas Topsoil, Sand.






TRANSMISSION













2025
Assembling the Archive: Possibility and Probability
11x15 inches

Image transfer on RFK Rives paper









2024
Learning to Soar
5x7x1.6 inches

Acrylic, Pumice, Sand, Potting Soil, Texas Topsoil, Cadets in ground school studying a radial aircraft engine (Air Force Historical Support Division, 1942).
















2025
Grid Scan: Soil memory shift
22x30 inches

Monotype print (third pull), organic matter, string, pigment on paper.


















April 14, 2025
Presented during CU Denver’s Performance Art Week at the Emmanuel Gallery.
Re:Future
9:36 minutes

Developed from Jackson’s 2019 video work The Future is a Constant Wake. In April 2025, Jackson performed Re:Future at Emmanuel Gallery for Performance Art Week XIII in Denver as a reworking of the earlier piece. In this version, carved print blocks function as vessels for soil, treated as a temporal collaborator that records presence, labor, and movement. 

Through improvisational choreography, soil acts as collaborator in a video-guided gesture in response to timing. Audio cues trigger repeated actions such as placing blocks and adjusting projectors, while live performances and projected image unfold simultaneously, collapsing material process, research, and action into a shared temporal space. 


 






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