Alex Jackson's paintings want us to change how we think about space

Prior to branching into painting during his second year of college, artist Alex Jackson considered himself an illustrator with aspirations of becoming a painter: “I’d always been in awe of painting and it was always the end goal for me,” he tells It’s Nice That. “I had this obsession with the technical aspects of how paint works and all the variations you can achieve when making a painting.” Going on to complete a BFA and MFA in the subject, it is now Alex’s primary devotion.

 

His recent work is inspired by a range of geographies, histories and contexts that, through their diversity, encourage Alex to “disrupt what I think I know and unlearn normative ideas about what is important/valuable and what is not.” His paintings are visual languages that allow him to think through spatial concerns which relate to “the historical production of space/environment” and also address “how we can shift and change the way we think about the spaces around us.” Explaining this in further detail, Alex notes that environment and architecture are receptive things that contain memories: “They are not just material vessels, they too hold information.”