Baby, [Hackers] are we, 2021
Sci-Fi Narratives and Historical Echoes
2024
Works include a multi-channel video installation, textured paintings, and sculptural forms that evoke themes of landscape, dwelling, and environmental change, inviting reflection on the intersections of place, history, and imagination.
iterations of a welcoming place
2023–2024
- HOST: Aryel René Jackson was on view from September 28. 2023 to January 28. 2024 at the Jones Center.
- In this commissioned installation titled “What it means: iterations of a welcoming place,” Jackson works across sculpture, video, sound, and performance to explore landscape as a site of personal representation. The work inhabits a space between painting and sculpture, between abstraction and representation, forming an imagined topography that merges figural imagery with geographic elements.
2020–2022
- Solo exhibition at Women & Their Work (Jan 18–March 3, 2022). The film-based installation combined recorded conversations with Black and Brown Indigenous residents of Austin with re-animated archival footage, including meteorological imagery and scenes of community life.
- Jackson appears holding a black weather balloon, using it as a metaphor for gauging a place’s atmosphere. The work weaves personal testimony, place-based observation, and archival material to reflect on how communities experience and respond to environmental and social conditions.
[Hackers] are we
2021
- A Tito’s Prize exhibition at Big Medium by artists Aryel “Ariel” René Jackson and Michael J. Love, performing as their alter egos Confuserella and Babé. The project imagined a Black futuristic location where wormholes connect past and present, blending personal research, rhythm tap dance, and multi-camera documentation.
2021
The film is supported by original music by Jazz composer Joseph C. Dyson Jr., whose score underscores the choreography and temporal weight of the soil-flag transformation. Additionally, the pool design was executed by Eto Otitigbe, whose minimalist interventions intersect the stenciled flag as a permanent backdrop to the ephemeral nature of soil.
Grandma never believed in hell
2019
During performances, collaborators Aryel “Ariel” René Jackson and Michael J. Love sweep soil into circles, tap dance on the surface, and move earth from the bucket, creating visual patterns and rhythmic sounds. The work combines sculpture, soil drawings, and live action, blending references to classrooms, yards, and ceremonial spaces.
24 x 72 x 30
Ruby City (2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon) family chair, flag poles, broom corn, cement, soil, chalk, paint on wall.
2019
In 2021, the work was featured in “Lux Aeterna” at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, University of Washington, curated by Emily Zimmerman and organized in partnership with Northwest Film Forum. In 2023, it received the Juried Award in the Time-Based category at ArtPrize, presented by juror Coka Treviño. In the same year, it was included as part of “This Place We Once Remembered” curated by Rachel Gugelberger in collaboration with Gabriel de Guzman at Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY. Across these presentations, the work has been adapted for different sites and audiences, taking the form of live performance, projected video, and installation. Watch an excerpt here.
2019
The work was included in “In Practice: Other Objects” at SculptureCenter, an exhibition curated by Gee Wesley in 2019, exploring how the lives of objects extend beyond their immediate function or context. The show gathered artists whose work examines the shifting status of material things, considering how objects can be repurposed, reimagined, or reactivated as vessels of history, narrative, or speculation.
Jackson approaches the piece as a way of tending to and sustaining memory, engaging with the legacies of family and place through the transformation of inherited materials. Watch an excerpt here.
2018
A redline map of Austin serves as a key reference material, informing the spatial arrangement and color placement within the installation. Installed directly in the space, the piece engages with the room’s dimensions and surfaces, integrating suspended and grounded elements to create a composition shaped by both material qualities and historical cartography.
2018
“Suspended Grid” draws structural inspiration from the “Connect Four” game, scaling up its familiar vertical grid into a large, outdoor installation. The grid functions not only as a visual framework but also as a participatory structure. Individual “playing pieces” reference intersectionality identifiers–such as race, gender, sexuality, and other identity categories–inviting participants to engage with the work by placing these markers within the grid. Chalk is provided so visitors can inscribe their own identifiers onto pieces, allowing each participant to effectively become a “playable” element in the structure. Through this format, the work transforms a familiar game into an interactive exploration of identity, visibility, and how individual positions intersect within a larger social framework.
2018
In 2018, it was presented in “A Recounting: Data, Disinformation & Black Experience” at Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, curated by Elisa Durette, which examined how informatino–both factual and distorted–has been used to shape narratives about Black life in the United States, drawing on sources from W.E.B. Du Bois’s sociological charts to contested studies such as the Moynihan Report and “The Bell Curve” to explore the influence of data, statistics, and everyday knowledge on public perception, historical record, and lived experience.
The Gains and Losses of Black Farmers in America
2016
Alongside these, upright plant-like sculptures constructued from wood, muslin, found fabric, and wire bear typewritten historical text on their elongated leaves. Controlled ink bleeds alter the legibility of the printed words, making the information alternatley accessible or obscured. Together, the components explore agricultural histories connected to Black farmers, layering factual records with material interventions to consider both what is preserved and what is left out of the documented narrative.
2015
In this piece, Jackson’s alter ego, Confuserella, journeys from the fictional world of Panrika to Plastica to examine the history, conditions, and origins of blues music. Using stop-motion animation, 3-D compositing, sound design, and archival footage, the video juxtaposes scenes of racially motivated violence with moments from everyday Black life, underscoring the coexistence of brutality and normalcy in Black communities. The reference to “blues” extends beyond the musical genre to the color itself, symbolizing an effort to “turn down” the intensity of trauma so that healing can occur. Jackson’s wider body of work–including video, animation, performance, and sculpture–continues to explore historical memory and cultural identity. Watch an excerpt here.
2015
”The Origin of the Blues” (2015), “BAM AKA By Any Means Incorporated”, “Blues Note (Feelings)”, “Confuserella’s Lab: Media Bay”, “The Confuserella Show (aka I Need a Shrink)”, and “What Are the Blues.”
Centered on the character Confuserella, an immigrant from the planet Panfrika to Plastica, the installation presented these works as interconnected “reports” mapping the character’s navigation of racial politics, historical memory, and real-life trauma. Drawing on Afrofuturist cartography, the videos layered fictional geographies with lived Black experiences, using archival material, animation, performance, and digital compositing to chart emotional, historical, and political terrain. Framed in the spirit of “Intersecting Imaginaries” (2015), curated in part by Dalaeja Foreman and Eva Mayhabal Davis, “Home AKA Media Lab” positioned these speculative maps within a broader conversation on place, identity, and shifting communal landscapes.