September 12, 2021
JESSE JACKSON’S SHOW Suburban Ecologies, (click here) installed at the Palm Court Arts Complex at Irvine, California, had an unconventional run from December 6, 2020, to March 14, 2021. As an exhibit, it took as its object the topography and built environment of Orange County and Irvine. The Great Park Art Gallery, which is part of the Palm Court Arts Complex, is one piece of the ambitious and flawed development of the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station into a sprawling and “innovative” public park and sports complex. Jackson’s show was meant to hold a fractured mirror up to a space — a town and an idea — making viewers contemplate along with the artist the difficulty of framing the contours of this “super suburb,” located between the Orange Coast and the Santa Ana Mountains. The Gallery could never open to the public during the time of the exhibit because of the pandemic, and the city provided instead, a digital walk-through. Elements of Jackson’s show have been reinstalled in Irvine City Hall and opened on August 12, 2021. The great virtue of Jackson’s engagement with the suburban landscape is his refusal to condescend to his subject matter: he does not exhibit the jaded response to Irvine’s built and natural environment, that can be characterized as something like, “It’s so beige and boring. It’s built for normies, not cosmopolitans like me.” In fact, Irvine’s diverse immigrant communities connect it to Middle Eastern, Latin American, Asian, and South Asian diasporas that span the globe. Holding Irvine in contempt for its presumed provincialism, therefore, sorely misses the mark. Jackson, an expat Canadian himself, avoids this trap....
