Bite, maul, scratch, hide, dodge, and sometimes forge a compromise — that’s how you survive in the natural world. Creatures develop habits, as well as allies, stratagems, and symbiotes. Life is not the idyll depicted in the work of the Hudson River School, for example, where the distant sun shimmers on placid waters, and animals are merely placeholders for the picturesque. Living in nature is hardscrabble, and it takes from you even as you give your life to it.
Roxanne Jackson’s parade of ceramic sea creatures in Unknown Giants, ensconced in a slim window on Walker Street, bridges the gap between fantasia and reality through something like a hybrid carnival and haunted house. Jackson commingles a black-tongued, fire-snorting, eight-foot-long, oceanic blue serpent and a dragon with drooping udders, the horn of a narwhal whale, and one blinged-out gold tooth. “Crystal” (2023) is a creature of popular imagination, but seen through a punk and goth lens, because alternative kids (I can tell that Jackson used to be one) deserve their own dream worlds, too.
Jackson’s mermaid, “Cordelia (2024), has black lipstick and bare breasts, and is several months pregnant. She’s not hood, but she’s hood adjacent. We also see an older version of her, Llorona, whose name alludes to the Mexican folklore figure La Llorona, a vengeful ghost who haunts bodies of water. She has barnacles attached all over, several shark bite wounds, including one that exposes her intestines, and a chunk of her tail missing. Elsewhere in the diorama is a cyclops starfish with a bloodshot and jaundiced eye, a large, mottled green fish gorging itself on smaller prey, and orange and white clown fish with green and blue anemone tentacles seemingly fused to the fishes’ bodies. Again, the reference is to the natural world: Clownfish and sea anemones have a symbiotic relationship in which the anemone protects the fish from predators and the fish cleans the anemone by eating algae and reef debris. Compromises must be made to survive the predators and the precariousness.
Jackson is also magnificent in the craftiness of her craft. The variety and nuance of the glazes, some of which require being fired multiple times at different temperatures, yield a bevy of creatures that look like grotesque phantasms and things you might find in your backyard. And the level of detail is gorgeous. Just look at the black eyeliner around the orb of the “All Seeing Sea Anemone” (2024), which contrasts with the delicate pink of the lacrimal caruncle.
Jackson is enamored of the bizarre partly because, I think, she recognizes that the demands of life impel creatures toward situations that, perceived from outside, might seem freakish. Maybe these are not monsters at all. Maybe they are just creatures who look like they shouldn’t belong — and in her world-building Jackson has made a place where they do.
Unknown Giants continues Anton Kern Gallery’s WINDOW (91 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through March 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
