The silver prints in this series spring from physical manipulations and a form of collage in the studio using optically distorted paper cutouts to introduce uncanny elements into a ‘live’ scene, here implying a kind of mythical animal-human hybrid.

The composed tabletop arrangements in this project are part of a theme that spans much of Jackson’s work. In this project, the objects and psychological space of the setups are dark and have a potential corruption. The torn paper and rent flesh align with the cut, bruised apples and the murky atmosphere

The forms of dead deer are all taken from Polaroid hunting snapshots (shown later in this gallery). The names of the images refer to the salient information written on the snapshots: the town where the animal was taken, its weight, and its antler points.

The inspiration for the Eden work came from a vast collection of Polaroid snapshots from the general store in Eden Mills, Vermont. The owner generously allowed the albums of years of hunting pictures to be scanned and archived. As part of the exhibition, hundreds of these Polaroids were re-presented, enlarged or at their original scale, examples of a rich and complicated vernacular practice of representation.

The set piece for the exhibition is a large-scale diptych of a symmetrical tabletop arrangement. The two halves, taken together, resemble a kind of altarpiece containing torn fragments of images and scattered apples.

The hunting snapshots are an example of a widespread vernacular representational tradition associated with ‘blood sports.’ Hunters and fisherman display their take, often with a guileless transparency of emotion, be it uncomplicated pride, hard satisfaction, or dazed wonder. The combination of emotional complexity and a natural visual logic of display (the truck bed is the tabletop for the Vanitas) make a rich visual topography- especially when multiplied by thousands of unique but similar variations.

The apples that appear throughout this project play multiple roles. They are a traditional (but not necessarily sporting) lure for deer in the early winter. They serve as a general still-life motif, visually and physically consumable fruit- and they allude to the idea of Eden as paradise fraught with moral and mortal temptation.

The piece imagines the dead deer reanimated, upright, with open eyes. The hads of the hunters can still be seen being towed unwitting through some other ethereal space by the spectral animals who reach through a divide to eat the apples floating on the table.

The piece imagines the dead deer reanimated, upright, with open eyes. The hads of the hunters can still be seen being towed unwitting through some other ethereal space by the spectral animals who reach through a divide to eat the apples floating on the table.

The apples are all slightly past their prime, bruised or wrinkled. A similar aging and wear affects the underlying paper fragments of the hunting images. Although the deer taken from their original Polaroid context are distorted optically to that they appear to come through from another visual space beyond or through the table, the tearing and folding emphasize the physical reality of the images.