Aryel René Jackson
A global story
Inheritance
Confuserella
Printmaking
Panels
Artist Statement
Curriculum Vitae (CV)
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©2025 Aryel René Jackson Studio
2019
6:12 minutes
2020
5:57 minutes
A Global Story is a body of work by Ariel René Jackson that examines storytelling and language as tools for navigating the spectral presence of history. Through film, sculpture, and installation, Jackson engages with the methodologies of archaeology to excavate layers of grief, survival, and transformation. This excavation is not merely about recovering the past but about reckoning with the ways in which history lingers, shaping both the present and future.
At the core of A Global Story is an inquiry into how cultural memory is preserved, distorted, or erased by colonialism and industrial progress. Jackson considers the role of doubt and imagination in reconstructing histories that have been systematically obscured. Drawing from research on early Black American pottery—known as colonoware—and the intellectual exchange between archaeologists Leland Ferguson and Christopher Espenshade, this body of work questions what counts as legitimate data when speculating about the past. Through layered imagery, poetic gestures, and material transformations—soil shifting under a hand’s touch, water eroding a carefully constructed house, pottery emerging and sinking in fluid currents—Jackson highlights the physical and emotional labor of reconstructing ancestral knowledge.
In works such as Doubt & Imagination, Jackson weaves together poetry, memoir, and research, employing in-camera effects to visualize the fragility and resilience of historical narratives. Similarly, The Future is a Constant Wake considers soil as a conduit for embodied knowledge, proposing touch and movement as ways of remembering and reconnecting with histories embedded in the land. Developed in collaboration with choreographer Michael J. Love, this work challenges the division between mind and body, arguing that material legacies of the past must be fully reckoned with in order to move beyond pain and toward transformation.
By layering archival and speculative narratives, A Global Story delves into the complex entanglements of family, labor, and intergenerational memory. Jackson’s work positions history as an active force—fluid, generative, and in constant motion—offering a vision of the past that is not static, but continually shaping the futures that our bodies will inhabit once again.