Cleve Carney Art Gallery presents “Carol Jackson: Pandemonium” March 5 – April 11. Using borrowed motifs from the industrial age, the multimedia exhibit highlights mythologies surrounding America’s rugged individualism and entitlement still present in the collective psyche. Materials, including tooled leather, evoke nostalgia of the American West and Manifest Destiny that Jackson contradicts through more humble, contemporary imagery.

The artist reception will take place Saturday, March 21 from 6 – 8 p.m. at Cleve Carney Art Gallery, located in the McAninch Arts Center at the College of DuPage (425 Fawell Blvd. in Glen Ellyn). Jackson will speak about her work on Tuesday, March 17 at 2 p.m. in the Playhouse Theatre.

In “Pandemonium,” Jackson presents new and recent work that combines the mundane with the romantic. Ornamental designs taken from 19th century American sheet music covers and American Chippendale Rococo furniture provide a sharp contrast to webcam images taken from California’s National Park Service and Department of Transportation of smog levels and interstate traffic flow on papier-mâché sculptures. Other works in the show include a series of ink drawings chronicling the last words shared by Texas death row prisoners.

With touches of absurdity and kitsch, “Pandemonium” explores the present with respect to the past. “This nostalgic state exists as a phantom,” Jackson writes in her artist statement, “a suspended, unresolved state that is neither being nor non-being, but rather a haunting that contaminates the present.”

Born in Los Angeles in 1962, Jackson’s work has taken the form of fictitious businesses, sheet music, itinerant and real estate signage embedded with text from epic literature embossed into leather. She has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including a solo exhibition at Changing Role-Move Over Gallery in Naples, Italy and at the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Her work has also been included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Kunsthaus Specktrasse, Gallery 400, the Smart Museum of Art and the Chicago Cultural Center. She most recently had a solo show at Chicago’s Threewalls and will exhibit new work at Tyler Wood Gallery in San Francisco in May 2015. Jackson’s work has been featured in Artforum, frieze, The New York Times, Interview Magazine, Art Fag City and the Chicago Tribune among other publications. She received her BFA from UCLA and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has been awarded a City of Chicago Artist Grant, an Artadia Grant and an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She currently lives and works in Chicago.

“Carol Jackson: Pandemonium” can be viewed during regular gallery hours Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. – 3 p.m., Thursday from 6 – 8 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. The gallery is open one hour prior to MAC performances held in the Belushi Performance Hall and during intermission. For more information about the exhibition and related special events, visit cod.edu/gallery or call 630.942.2321.

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Tags: carol Jackson, Cleve Carney, College of Dupage