{"id":7526,"date":"2011-10-06T18:40:28","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T18:40:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=7526"},"modified":"2025-11-16T09:02:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T16:02:03","slug":"artist-profile-shilo-jackson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/artist-profile-shilo-jackson\/","title":{"rendered":"Artist Profile: Shilo Jackson"},"content":{"rendered":"

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“What do Salvador Dali, Alice in Wonderland, the Mona Lisa, and fortunes from cookies have in common? For one thing, they are among the ephemera collected by Shilo Jackson to be used in various combinations someday in a painting. That day is here as Jackson finishes some 30 new works for her Autogenous Automatous<\/em> exhibit opening October 21 at Stolen and Escaped Gallery, below Frosty Darling, on Broadway . . .”<\/p>\n

At a glance one might think these bits and pieces of collected material are collaged to a cork or fabric background. That\u2019s the trick. Actually, they are carefully and highly realistically painted. Even the cork is an illusion, painstakingly painted to make you believe you could feel the rough texture if you touched it.<\/p>\n

The French call this\u00a0trompe l\u2019oeil<\/em>, which means \u201ctrick the eye.\u201d When a viewer looks at Jackson\u2019s painting and says, \u201cOh my God, you painted this?\u201d she\u2019s delighted. \u201cInitially they think I\u2019ve just stuck pieces to a board,\u201d she says. When they realize it\u2019s really a painting, not mixed media, \u201cthen I know I\u2019ve accomplished something successful.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not just the visual trickery that draws you and holds you to study Jackson\u2019s work. The images she selects are combined in ways that have meaning for her, often with tongue-in-cheek humor. It may take a minute or two for the viewer to get it. Or the viewer may get a completely different meaning entirely. That\u2019s perfectly all right with Jackson. What may start as autobiographical becomes shared meaning. \u201cI leave it up to the viewer to interpret what that meaning is. In doing so, they become part of the experience,\u201d says Jackson.<\/p>\n

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Take, for example, the painting of the \u201ceyes.\u201d On a painted cork background, Jackson has painted images of a half-mask of a woman with big eyes; a portion of the Mona Lisa, including those famous eyes, divided into puzzle pieces; a card promoting Fortune Teller Miracle Fish; and a strip of paper like the fortune from a cookie, on which is written \u201cYou shall soon achieve perfection.\u201d One might interpret this painting to be about a puzzling future; the fact that nothing, be it our eyes, a fortune teller, or a fortune cookie, can really help us see or predict our future. Someone else might find something entirely different in the juxtaposition of those images.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a friend who bought one of my paintings and he thought I painted it specifically for him, which is great. But I hadn\u2019t. But he found some intricate messages in what I had painted and that\u2019s great because it spoke to him on one level and it spoke to me on a completely different level,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

This body of work is an evolution of work she exhibited at Art Access in 2008 \u2013 her first solo show. The works in that show, called \u201cNote to Self,\u201d were the beginnings of her use of ephemera in an autobiographical way and developing the trompe l\u2019oeil style (read a review\u00a0here<\/a>). However, her earliest experiments with the technique go back to her days as a student at Salt Lake Community College. Her instructor, Sandy Gagon, challenged her to try trompe l\u2019oeil painting. That was the first time she painted cork, and she\u2019s been hooked ever since.<\/p>\n