This exhibition takes its cue from its title: a shift away from the mountaintops of history, where victors and the tally of subjugated bodies are inscribed, toward the clearings, where other lives thrive, persistently progressing towards their own liberation.
Upon entering the Réfectoire, the visitor is presented with You Forgot to See Me Coming, a series of equestrian portraits that reimagine formidable figures such as Mary Fields, Amelio Robles, the Adelitas of the Mexican Revolution, and Selika Lazevski, a black equestrian performer who captivated audiences in 19th century France. Working from archival fragments, Jackson inhabits these figures through performative embodiment, staging them with agency in moments of dignity and proud presence.
In new works from the Hidden in Plain Sight (American Simulacrum) series, the artist wears a leather garment tooled with symbology that gathers the convergence of African, European, and Indigenous identities in the Americas. Through this character, she embodies cultural convergences as well as the encoded practices enacted in the open, within the very clearings referenced in the title.
The equestrian motif itself traces a history of circulation. Introduced through Spanish colonization and shaped by earlier exchanges across Al-Andalus, it was transformed in the Americas through Indigenous and African-descendant practices. Jackson mobilizes this lineage to situate the body within a continuum of movement and survival.
In contrast, Intimate Justice in the Stolen Moment turns to quieter registers. Here, imagined Black women appear in states of rest, introspection, and weightlessness: images largely absent from any existing archives, where such lives were systematically reduced to violence, servitude or spectacle. Jackson does not seek to complete this record, but to open it: to bring the past into the present as an intervention, positioning freedom not as something granted in the past, but as an inalienable right long fought for.
Text written by Marisol Rodríguez.
