Roxanne Jackson’s Mythological Threshold Guardians

(Published on Eyes Towards the Dove on January 26th, 2014)

After visiting Roxanne Jackson’s solo exhibition Death Valley at AIRPLANE Gallery last fall, I began thinking more about the mythological in contemporary art. Jackson’s sculptural installation contained a cast of pop culture/horror characters similar to what one might find at a wax museum. Jackson’s characters and objects however, are not just one off weird or nightmarish things. They are talismans creating transformational and even humorous dialogue between the culturally accepted ideas of what is beautiful and what is beastly, what is banal and what is sublime and the work prompts this dialogue on the role of our mythology today.

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Her varied subjects compliment her varied mediums, working in materials such as paper-mache’, hair, refined glazed ceramics, wax, fur and feathers, she strips a hierarchy of the preciousness of materials as they integrate into an overall discordant tone. Jackson’s work calls to my mind the infamous Greek Medusa character, the guardian protectress monster, usually illustrated with the face of a terrifying human female, venomous snakes replacing her long locks of hair. The many ceramic snake characters wrapped around differing parts and personalities in Jackson’s work, add to this tone of old lore and dark magic.

If myths are considered truthful depictions, exaggerated or overelaborated accounts of historical events, or natural phenomena depicted as allegory or personification, then Jackson’s mythos felt like an accurate imaginative manifestation of many aspects of our current times. Each character or object has a history it wants to tell, a story holding sometimes a monstrous tale and other times a sacred narrative. No matter which, the work brings to the fore front the conversation about the importance of mythology in our individual and collective psyches, a topic many contemporary artists have or are tackling.

There are four basic functions of mythology: metaphysical/mystical, cosmological, sociological, and pedagogical. The metaphysical/mystical function is to awaken us to mystery and wonder, our mystical “ground of being”. The cosmological function of mythology is to describe the shape of the cosmos, its vastness and our total integration within it.  Its sociological function is to pass down moral and ethical codes for people of that culture to follow, and which help define that culture and its prevailing social structure. The pedagogical function is to lead us through particular rites of passage and rituals, defining significant stages of our lives – from dependency to maturity to old age, and finally, to death. Rites of passage bring us back into harmony with the “ground of being” and allow us to make the journey from one stage to another with a sense of purpose. This is why rituals are a part of nearly every religion. And according to myth-ritual theory, the existence of myth is directly tied to ritual.

Suzi Gablik writes in her 1991 book, The Reenchantment of Art:

One of the peculiar developments in our Western world is that we are losing our sense of the divine side of life, of the power of imagination, myth, dream and        vision.  The particular structure of modern consciousness, centered in a rationalizing, abstracting and controlling ego, determines the world we live in and how we perceive and understand it; without the magical sense of perception, we do not live in a magical world.  We no longer have the ability to shift mindsets and thus to perceive other realities – to move between the worlds, as ancient shamans did. -13

Jackson’s work demonstrates a shift in how what Gablik writes is changing, especially in the art world. Comparative mythology came about in the nineteenth-century and it reinterpreted myth as part of the evolution toward science. This seems to be tied up in the rationalization in modern consciousness. However other interpretations do not think there is any relationship between myth as a stage in the evolution of science, and concepts like Jungian archetypes and Joseph Campbell’s writing on the hero’s journey and myth as “metaphor of spiritual potentiality”, connect it with a human necessity, a need of our individual and cultural psyches. Fantasy novels and legendary tales that reach extreme popularity – like the Harry Potter series – demonstrate how much we as a society need our mythologies – and our magic.

Often our culture has turned to celebrity and pop culture as our mythology but this is problematic because mythology has to be encased in story, not real people, and in the true values of that culture, not perceived or artificial values. And certainly not values driven by the media and capitalisms’ control our hopes and desires. Jackson’s work is a critique of this as well as a vessel of proposed mythology, one presented to us through need. If myths are public dreams and can function as an embodying personification of natural phenomenon, after experiencing and watching other natural disasters colliding with environmental, economic and resource disasters like we have seen in this past year, then one can sense where these monsters of our time come from in the cultural imagination that Jackson and others are giving life.

In Jackson’s piece Chrome Cats, a series of ceramic sculptures Jackson uses both the human and animal figures as a point of departure, distorting, abstracting and scrutinizing it as well as morphing them together. She explains:

I deconstruct an image of a domestic cat and a snake to depict the internal duality of beauty and beastly rooted in Jungian psychology. Domestic cats offer furry, lovable companionship and are a common subject of kitsch. Kitty-themed tchotchkes are ubiquitous—they thrive in the form of figurines and cookie jars. Meanwhile, snakes are collectively misunderstood to be merely venomous and loathsome, their imagery effectively utilized in the creepy tattoos that identify Lord Voldemort’s allies (in Rowling’s Harry Potter series). The quotidian belief of the western populace accepts that the cat is cuddlesome while the snake is inherently evil and directly associated with sin.

Jackson is using popular cultural symbolism to make us face even these limitations of simplified dual thinking – good and evil, light and dark, black and white.  She is also using symbols of fear. In the history of mythologies, across many cultures, time and religions, characters of demons are always present. The demon is an accepted beastly part of life, a part of the human personality, and not a literal figure, but a metaphor of a energy inside a person or culture that is in need of coming out. In some mythologies if the demon is further repressed it becomes a devil – simply a metaphor of destruction. The mythological demons are often eerie but they serve a purpose as transformational and as apt metaphors so that we can then tangibly grasp to understand them as our troubles, fears, or any type of unreleased energies – positive or negative. Therefore these monsters within myths have existed in social practice and all cultures since the beginning of time, a cathartic and emblematic point in the story.

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One plane of reference within the metaphors of myth is that of death; whether it is a physical death or a spiritual one. It is the threshold of the passage from time to eternity. It is the passage of losing oneself together with the world. In this passage one is often confronted with the choice of disengaging altogether with the psychological hold of all cultural constructs including the mythological figures who have led you to this moment of threshold crossing, and losing the psyche itself into a moment of total integration within the loss of a separate self. Or another choice is to dedicate oneself in a devotional way to holding onto faithful love to the icons. Those characters who accompany us to moments of large transformational steps in our psyches and in our physical existence, are in two worlds at once, temporal in the human appeal of their pictured denotations or connotations, opening up a door to eternity.

Jackson’s sculptures hit on this primordial aspect of the myth, from the threshold guardians to the monsters. They critique our use of pop cultures role in this. Myth teaches us how to look and brings us through the ritual that aligns mind and body, aiding and walking us through deep dreamless sleep into consciousness, the deep sleep awake. Artists’ work that fluidly allows us to meander around in all of these worlds and disintegrates our constructed realities, to me,  always feels like tools to aid in elevating consciousness, no matter how bizarre the container.

 

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