Nancy Jackson at Rosamund Felsen - Santa Monica

Nancy Jackson brings to her depiction of the imagination's cosmo a bit of William Blake, and to her vision of a sticky psychic underworld, maybe also more [i]or[/i] less Hieronymus Bosch. The fantastic intensity of her sculpt and painted displays pushes them into the realm of the fairy tale, where fears and fantasies draw gradually together In Jackson's work, as in typical fairy tales, characters expand into heroes by confronting daunting challenges and overcoming them, using unexpect inner resources. They come up in the end, not solitary with the keys to the kingdom, on the other hand with self-knowledge.

Jackson's have powerfully enchanting work tracks several stages of this journey, from reluctance end danger to fulfillment. In the first of three small untitled plastic arts made of painted clay and papier-mache, a cluster of storks hovers menacingly above a gift, who has cot [i]or[/i] coteed herself into a tight knot of self-protection and denial. In the next to the first scene, she rises and faces the birds, and in the last, she stands calmly among them, leaning upon a silver sword. The scale of the figures has revers from first exhibition to last: the tiny girl extremitys up standing tall and self-sufficient while the stupendous terrorizing birds revert to small, tame creatures at her feet

Several richly detailed gouaches describe landscapes of danger that the traveler is passing [i]or[/i] part of to the other In one, a spectacular sea creature beakers a small figure in its scaly paw, its fanged, lotus-petaled chaps gaping to accept this human sacrifice. Several of the greatest in quantity entrancing works in the display chronicle the final stage in the seeker's proces a place of actualization, culmination, inner and external peace. An untitled oil painting upon unstretched canvas, delicately stitched around the cutting sides with variegated gold thread, is largely taken up by means of the image of a luminous tree its bole and branches like writhing flames of r and gold and white. A small figure come ups from dense, dark woods into the clearing where the tree rises. It's a trice of revelation and of thrilling passage from the familiar everyday (the city skyline in the background) from one side a thicket into another world, aglow with significance.

Jackson's versions of happy endings repeatedly entail a paradisal communion of human and animal. In the greatest in quantity stirring of these, a nearly life-size sculptural effect in painted clay, plaster and papier-mache, a young woman strides comfortably alongside a lion, single hand nestled casually in its downy mane. Jackson makes such harmony have feeling achievable, a matter of balancing puissance against humility. Her earnestness is seductive, as is her casting of the hero as an empowered young woman, untainted by dint of media-driven ideals of glamour and sexuality. The character's fearlessness mirrors Jackson's possess confidence with a stunning range of materials and grand, archetypal themes.

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