Iterations

Iterations, through panoramic compositing and transparency overlay, captures the dominant and divergent patterns created by ubiquitous typologies in the city. Images centered on instances of the same building-type are superimposed, permitting the juxtaposition of the common and unique characteristics of each panoramic scene. Consistent elements reinforce each other through repetition, while inconsistencies are ill-defined, rendering the typologies’ archetypes.

A collaborative project with Tori Foster. More details coming soon. . .

Cao Chang Di

From May 1-25, 2008, I exhibited a selection from body of work entitled Cao Chang Di. The three exhibition prints, each 16" x 24", are shown below.

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.

Usonia Road

From May 11-30, 2009, I exhibited solo collection entitled Usonia Road: Frank Lloyd Wright in the Post-Fordist City.

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 accompanies the show explains my intentions:

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and Henry Ford (1863-1947) were two towering historical figures in America and beyond. Ford is credited with Fordism, that is, mass production of a good coupled with high wages for the workers who produced the good, so as to permit them to purchase it themselves. This resulted in widespread prosperity, centred on consumerism. Wright's Usonian project was a sequence of architectural propositions designed in response to the needs of this emerging middle-class. Both men had totalizing visions for society, visions that persist today in bastardized form. Fordism broke down in the early 1970's as the economies of Western nations shifted away from manufacturing and industry and towards the knowledge economy. Elements of Usonia, such as single-family homes on generous lots, curvilinear streets and the carport, characterize the suburbs of the contemporary american city. Today, the majority of Wright's built Usonian work survives in cities that have made the difficult transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy, and yet the buildings themselves remain frozen in time as a result of their landmark status. By presenting a selection of Wright's work paired with its contemporary context - be it decayed or renewed - I reveal the tension between visionary architecture and the evolving urban landscape.

The show prints were arranged as diptychs or in larger groupings, all located on a single street. The group of eight images that form the centrepiece of the show are shown below. They were all shot on Howe Street in Racine, Wisconsin, the site of Frank Lloyd Wright's seminal Johnson Wax Building.









All images from this body of work is available for purchase. Prices range from $300 for framed diptychs to $900 for the framed Johnson Wax series shown above. Please contact me for more information.

This exhibition was generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

EXPOSED 2009

From May 8-31, 2009, I exhibited a print in a group exhibition at the Gladstone Hotel entitled Exposed: Innovation, Transformation, Revolution.


The exhibition was part of CONTACT, Toronto's annual month-long festival of photography. The text that accompanies the show explains my intentions:

In this piece, entitled Luke Stern in the Jester/Pfeiffer Residence, I have combined the techniques developed for one body of work, and applied them to the theme of another. Cao Chang Di, exhibited at the Gladstone as part of Contact 2008, was a series of composite images that incorporate the dynamic information from multiple time-lapse frames. Usonia Road: Frank Lloyd Wright in the Post-Fordist City, currently exhibiting at the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery as part of Contact 2009, is a selection of images of Frank Lloyd Wright residences and their contemporary context. This piece shows Luke Stern multiply occupying one of these residences, the Jester/Pfeiffer residence in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The exhibition print, which is 24" x 50", is shown below. This work is available for purchase, archivally mounted in a 30" x 60" frame, for $1500. Please contact me for more information.

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.

West Lodge

Details coming soon . . . click here for more information.