Iterations

From May 1-31, 2010, I exhibited a selection of work from Iterations, an ongoing collaborative project with Tori Foster.


The four exhibition prints are shown below. Each limited edition print is available for purchase in 24” x 96” and 12" x 48" sizes. Please contact me for more information.

Eleven Home Depots, Southern Ontario (2010)

Seven Essos, Toronto (2009)

Eight Best Buys, Southern Ontario (2010)

Nine Beer Stores, Southern Ontario (2010)

Iterations is focused on repeated built forms and their surrounding environments. Each panorama is comprised of several photographs that are composited through transparency overlay. For example, Seven Essos, Toronto consists of seven different Esso gas stations in the city of Toronto superimposed on one another, creating a juxtaposition of the common and the unique characteristics of each scene. Resonant elements, such as the bright red canopies over the pumps, constructively interfere, while inconsistent elements, such as the pavement markings and the surrounding environments, resolve in an inchoate and ephemeral manner. The subject matter of the completed work shown above are branded structures; the subject matter of work currently in production includes street furniture (Eight Streetcar Shelters, Spadina Avenue Toronto; Seventeen Sugar Beach Chairs, Toronto) and urban and suburban housing (Eight Low-Rises, Regent Park; Thirteen Single-Family Homes, Markham).

Iterations privileges ubiquitous forms of urbanity; it is a method for deriving archetypes through the accumulation of formal information. These composite moments also reveal how our visual world is organized around these architectural anchors by conflating the self-reinforcing narratives of repeated built forms with the unique circumstances of their occupation and of their surrounding environments.

On April 24, 2010, Iterations was the featured on Serial Consign.

On February 21, 2011, Iterations was featured on The Online Photographer, as part of a conversation about Corrine Vionnet's Photo Opportunities.

Selected work from Iterations has also been exhibited at Gallery TPW as part of Photorama 2009, Photorama 2010, and Photorama 2011. At Photorama 2011, we exhibited a new piece, shown below.

Eight Streetcar Shelters, Spadina Avenue, Toronto (2011)

Figure and Ground

From May 5-22, 2011, I exhibited Figure and Ground with Derek Flack at the Gladstone Gallery. This exhibition is part of CONTACT, Toronto's annual month-long festival of photography.


Eight images from this body of work are shown below. Each limited edition print is available for purchase in 36” x 36,” 18" x 18" and 9" x 9" sizes. Please contact me for more information.

Toronto Tower Apartments #3 (2011)

Toronto Tower Apartments #9 (2011)

Toronto Tower Apartments #11 (2011)

Toronto Tower Apartments #17 (2011)

Toronto Tower Apartments #2 (2011)

Toronto Tower Apartments #12 (2011)

Toronto Tower Apartments #22 (2011)

Toronto Tower Apartments #19 (2011)

This project began in May 2007 when I exhibited Landmarks and Monuments: Residential Complexes in Toronto’s Urban Periphery at the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery. At that time, I described the work as follows:

The residential complexes in the periphery of Toronto are definitive landmarks: markers of boundary and locality, points of orientation, representations of an instance and turning point in time, and structures of compelling historical and aesthetic interest. Their monumental significance is belied by a lack of conscious popular awareness of their presence and status. By presenting these buildings as consequential architecture, I aim to stimulate discourse about their role in our city.

Or, to put it more succinctly: by shooting the tower apartments as places of beauty and significance, I help make them worth renewing.

By adopting the technique and style of commercial architectural photography, this work deliberately deviates from a more common artistic approach to the subject of tower apartments, which is characterized primarily by ambivalence.

Images from this growing body of work have formed the visual basis for a large number of tower apartments neighbourhood renewal initiatives over the past four years. This unanticipated but welcome adoption and use fulfills my artistic intent: to stimulate discourse on the role of Tower Neighbourhoods in Toronto, creating the opportunity for the consequential nature of these sites to enter the popular consciousness.

The new images shown above will serve as a launching point for a book project on the topic of Toronto tower apartments. The work featured in the book will be disseminated through a variety of media and distribution methods, including public exhibition at non-traditional venues (e.g. shows in tower neighbourhoods) and facilitation of the work’s use in future scholarly and public outreach initiatives (e.g. publication-ready image packages). The book will be funded in 2011, shot in 2o12 , and published in 2013.

This ongoing project is important because it creates visibility for the subject matter, making it familiar, accessible and emotionally affecting for scholars, design professionals, artists and the public. It also serves an important documentary function, cataloguing this ubiquitous buiding type at a pivotal moment in its history.

On May 12, 2011, I presented this body of work at the second Tower Neighbourhood Renewal Symposium. The poster from this presentation is shown below.

On May 18, 2011, this exhibition was featured on BlogTO.

Small Object Design

Details coming soon. . .

Click here for Winter 2010.

Click here for Summer 2010.

Click here for Winter 2009.

Constellation

In August 2010, Luke Stern and I entered Constellation in the Sukkah City competition.


The text of our proposal read as follows.

On a typical night in New York City, most constellations are missing: light pollution is an unfortunate reality in today’s cities, resulting in bright but starless night. During the 10 days of Sukkah City, we propose a series of unique installations -- Constellation -- that will regenerate the missing stars.

Constellation is a modular system of lightweight elements constructed of contemporary schach: composite products comprised of renewable or recycled celluloid products. These sustainable building materials reinterpret the Sukkah in a contemporary context. Constellation’s eleven unique components can be flexibly assembled into a nearly infinite variety of enclosures, each of which satisfy the Sukkah’s constraints and creating a remarkably fluid interior space.

Each morning, a team of volunteers will assemble Constellation into a new configuration: the ancient patterns of the night sky will govern its formal evolution. The installation will reveal, through a precisely aligned aperture, the spot in the sky where specific stars were once visible. These missing stars will be made visible by harnessing the city's excess luminance to backlight a pinhole screen.

By recreating the missing stars, Constellation will bring the delight and wonder of the cosmos back to the heart of New York City. Unlike online maps and global positioning systems, these ancient navigational beacons do more than just identify our coordinates: they help us contemplate our place in the universe.

This proposal was an evolution of our Master of Architecture thesis project, Fabricating Sustainable Concrete Elements.

BlocKit

In July 2010, Geoff Turnbull, Gavin Berman and I entered BlocKit into the Open Source House competition. Excerpts from our competition panels are shown below.

Automatic Revisited

On April 23, 2009, Luke Stern and I successfully defended our Master of Architecture thesis project at the University of Toronto Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, entitled Automatic Revisited: Fabricating Sustainable Concrete Elements.


Our thesis abstract summarizes our intentions:

The constructional elements of a building are normally considered components in service of the greater architectural endeavor. Yet elements are also design problems: direct consideration elevates them from the conceptual role of passive expression to that of active contribution, and calls into question their accepted form, function and materiality. The desired qualities of a complete building -- firmitas, utilitatis, and venustatis -- are the same as those desired in a constructional element, suggesting that elements warrant evaluation beyond their ability merely to be organized creatively: the architecture of the element is itself architecture.

We have developed a family of modular armature elements that permit a large degree of formal variability using a small number of discrete parts. These elements emerged as a contemporary response to Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Automatic project, an early exploration into the constructional element as a parallel design exercise. The Automatic system provided a point of departure, and prompted a new set of concrete forms that respond to contemporary sustainable criteria, including maximal architectural freedom, optimal environmental performance, and minimal life-cycle costs. Through an open-ended collaborative problem-solving process, we developed several prototypes; through full-scale fabrication, we tested the validity of the prototypes in confrontation with reality.

A selection of images from our final presentation is shown below.











Two images of our final installation are shown below.



In 2010, this project was published in the journal MAS Context.

Cao Chang Di

From May 1-25, 2008, I exhibited a selection from body of work entitled Cao Chang Di. The three 16" x 24" exhibition prints are shown below. Each limited edition print is available for purchase: please contact me for more information.

An excerpt from my exhibition description is shown below.

Jesse Colin Jackson isolates a location, frames a composition and compiles a linear sequence of moments through time-lapse photography. He then creates a single composite image that incorporates dynamic information from multiple frames. He thus presents, simultaneously, parallel experiential narratives. In doing so, he calls attention to the vitality of the spatial location and creates surreal representations that suggest essential aspects of the place itself. His composites of key locations in Cao Chang Di, a village in the peri-urban periphery of Beijing, reveal the state of conflict and compromise that characterize China's rapidly changing landscape.

Cao Chang Di was part of Timespace, which also featured Tori Foster and Jon Reed. We each explore alternative, singular ways of representing our experience of time in space, employing three distinct techniques to combine visual information from multiple frames into a single, synthetic image. Tori Foster creates low-fidelity portraits of movement through a two-dimensional plane over the span of several seconds, while Jon Reed captures the essential character, experience and memory of a particular city street by layering successive images taken at regular intervals. Timespace was part of Exposed: Depictions, Discoveries, Discussion & Debate, which itself is part of CONTACT, Toronto's annual month-long festival of photography.


This work is derived from imagery collected from May to July 2007, when I participated in the Beijing Architectural Studio Enterprise. There, we collaborated with Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei and American architects Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray on projects that documented the rapidly changing conditions of Cao Chang Di, a village on the outskirts of Beijing. My first project was a series of six portraits of villagers. The portraits were accompanied by excerpts of interviews in which they were asked their opinions about the changes taking place in the village. Two examples are shown below.



A selection from this body of work will be included in an exhibition to be held at WORKShop Toronto, opening January 23, 2010.

Landmarks and Monuments

From May 10-31, 2007, I exhibited a solo collection entitled Landmarks and Monuments: Residential Complexes in Toronto's Periphery. The exhibition, at the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery in Toronto, was part of CONTACT, Toronto's annual month-long festival of photography. Academic support for this project was provided by Adrian Blackwell, a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. The text that accompanied the show explains my intentions:

The residential complexes in the periphery of Toronto are definitive landmarks: markers of boundary and locality, points of orientation, representations of an instance and turning point in time, and structures of compelling historical and aesthetic interest. Their monumental significance is belied by a lack of conscious popular awareness of their presence and status. By presenting these buildings as consequential architecture, I aim to stimulate discourse about their role in our city.

A selection from the 8 show prints, which were 40cm high, and between 50cm and 175cm wide, is shown below.






In November 2007, an image from this body of work was published in Concrete Toronto: A Guide to Concrete Architecture from the Fifties to the Seventies, published by Coach House Press.
In April 2008, an image from this body of work was featured on the home page of Toronto Jane's Walk, advertising their upcoming tours of Toronto's inner suburbs.

In May 2009, I helped Graeme Stewart of ERA Architects lead a Jane's Walk of one of the locations featured in this body of work. An image i took of this event is shown below; several more can be found at the link above. An excerpt from the description of the work I gave during the event can be heard in Spacing Radio 006 (beginning at 2:55), a podcast that documented Jane's Walks throughout the city.


In September 2008, images from this body of work were featured extensively in the Mayor's Tower Renewal Opportunities Book, a City of Toronto initiative to improve the condition of these complexes.

In October 2009, images from this body of work were featured extensively in the publication Tower Renewal Guidelines: For the Comprehensive Retrofit of Multi-Unit Buildings in Cold Climates, a University of Toronto led initiative to describe the technical issues surrounding tower improvements.


A funding proposal to extend this project to a large number of Toronto sites is currently underway.

All images from this body of work are available for purchase. Prices range from $250 to $500. Please click here to download a package containing more information on available images and their prices.