Paul Jackson
Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary

Everywhere in "Monument", Paul Jackson's body of untitled works, there is a stillness and a careful quiet. Rough plywood, wet paint, metal objects leaning on the wall, all give the feeling that the artist has just stepped away from his work-in-progress. We can assume he meant to come back quickly, but there is a feeling that he has been delayed for some time now. The dripping paint on the wire frame is frozen in time, everything paused and waiting.

Around the room are a number of small sculptures on rough plywood plinths, which are custom fitted to the scale of the works and hand-made of a straightforward, minimalist design. The jagged forms suggest small buildings—models with their material and construction pared back to the elements giving the sense of a sketch, but also of solidity and presence. One presents a negative space in plaster, another cast in bronze from a 2 x 4 broken where the wood is strongest, across the grain.

On the walls a number of large paintings bear deep-grooved intersecting lines that demarcate the shifts between shades of subtly tinted whites and reveal hints of the linen beneath the layers. Tarnished black and shiny copper metal objects lean on the wall here and there, like broom handles or crutches. As in the surfaces of the paintings, shapes of other works are reflected, all bringing to mind visions of mirrored high-rise towers, or shards of glass.

Black-and-white photographs corroborate the architectural suggestions and at the same time push the sculptures out of the realm of the architect's maquette. Their fragmented imagery presents the details and geometric forms of a real building and offer a clean, captured glimpse of careful craftsmanship, from their content to their crisp presentation—in contrast to the hand-formed shapes and raw textures in Jackson's three-dimensional works. Knowing that the building pictured is an Italian palazzo that was never completed, never inhabited, provides a clue to the exhibition's puzzle.

Another clue is offered to those who wander to the back of the gallery: past the framing table and the racks of paintings a faint pencil drawing hangs on the far wall, almost tucked into a corner. A viewer might easily miss this very important element of the exhibition, but its distance from the other works bespeaks its relationship as murky antecedent. The faint sketch references a proposed monument designed by Paul Jackson's late father, an architect, in the swell of post-war optimism in Europe. Jackson found the original drawing in a book of proposals published in the 1950s, perhaps as a consolation for the fact that the planned monument was never built.

"Monument" is a conversation between hope and false starts, between earnest endeavor and unexpected interruption, between planning and waiting; it asks questions about how the beginning can know the finish, and insists, in many ways, that the one is the other and vice versa. 

- Lisa Benschop

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