Tomashi Jackson creates work that coerces the viewer into questioning the current systems that govern the way we live. By conducting her inquiries into ancient and contemporary histories, Jackson reveals how the past can adversely influence our current realities if taken only at face value, rather than properly dissected and analysed.

Her practice offers a commentary and analysis of systems, while Jackson also provides personal context which serves as a conceptual annotation that informs her work. Inspired by her Los Angeles upbringing and a recent Athens residency with ARC Athens, Jackson filmed original music videos to classic throwback R&B songs. The tunes reflect the artist’s personal history and familiar connection to songs about unrequited love, nostalgia, and possibility. Toying with humour and play, Jackson utilises music and film as a passageway to speaking about collective memory, personal fulfilment, and experimentation.

Jackson continuously draws lines between formal and material explorations that speak to recent histories of displacement and disenfranchisement by connecting geometric experimentation and the conversation around the systematisation of injustice. Her multimedia practice is grounded in Josef Albers’s research and colour theory, which argues that colour is relative and the brain arranges data by unconscious processes.

By exploring notions of mandatory civic and political participation, Jackson has recently created work that centres on the question of democracy, considering its conceptual origins in ancient Greece. She compares and contrasts this history of democracy to that of present-day United States of America by using as an anchor the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – a state- and local-level act implemented to prevent discriminatory practices that blocked Black Americans from exercising their right to vote. Jackson marks this act as the official establishment of American democracy while also considering various public crises to interrogate the true state of democracy in the United States today.

If I Ever Fall In Love Again, 2019
Tommy Tonight with the Staffs of Onassis AiR and Night Gallery, Los Angeles
Single channel video with sound, 3’17’’
Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles

Boys To Men, 2019
Tommy Tonight with Dimosthenis Babadie Kallay and the McCants-Green Family
Single channel video with sound, 7’32’’
Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles

We're All Gonna Go!, 2019
Tommy Tonight with Eleni Mylonas
Single channel video with sound, 9’22’’
Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles