Riverside, CA
Recent Acquisitions, 2026
Wall vinyl
3 x 3.5’
Vitrine, 2026
Vitrine with artist book and ephemera
Recent Acquisisitions: Tar Pit with Preparators Emily & Victoria, 2026
Inkjet print in aluminum frame
14 x 18”
Recent Acquisitions: Video Works, 2026
Inkjet print in aluminum frame
14 x 18”
Recent Acquisitions: Artist’s Photographic Archive, 2026
Inkjet print in aluminum frame
14 x 18”
Recent Acquisitions: Women are Beautiful by Garry Winogrand by Rachel Jackson, 01, 2026
Inkjet print in aluminum frame
14 x 18”
Recent Acquisitions: Ransom for John Paul Getty III (Severed Ear with Lock of Hair and Envelope), 2026
Inkjet print in aluminum frame
14 x 18”
Recent Acquisitions: Women are Beautiful by Garry Winogrand by Rachel Jackson, 02, 2026
Inkjet print in aluminum frame
14 x 18”
Recent Acquisitions: Tar Pit in Doorway, 2026
Inkjet print in aluminum frame
14 x 18”
Recent Acquisitions: False Artifact, 2026
14 x 18”
Recent Acquisitions: High Priestess of Information, 2026
Inkjet print in aluminum frame
14 x 18”
14 x 18”
At the Museum: Tar Pit, 2026
Single-channel video,
Color, sound, 7:45
Color, sound, 7:45
Master’s Thesis Written by Rachel Jackson
Rather than resisting historicization altogether, Recent Acquisitions attempts to circumvent the process by staging it prematurely and on my own terms. Within the project, I, as the artist, briefly undertook the role of registrar/archivist/curator and sought to assert my own autonomy by governing the circumstances under which my work is contextualized. In doing so, I am able to distance myself from the unspoken hierarchies that surround artistic production–for example, the cultural capital derived from a curator organizing a museum exhibition or the admission of a body of work into an institution’s permanent collection. Though Recent Acquisitions may not pass as a true mimicry of this, it is, regardless, an attempt to exert agency as a young artist. By reacting to the circumstances of the exhibition, both in its content and execution, it aspires to function as a responsive work.
The works included within Recent Acquisitions operate on two registers. The first consists of a context-responsive gesture–the insertion of my work into the collection spaces of UCR Arts and its subsequent re-presentation as a photograph. The second is the web of referents that constitutes the placed work: discrete works alluding to economies of institutional power. These works range in tonality from a facsimile of Garry Winogrand’s Women are Beautiful, manipulated by exchanging the face of every female subject with my own (hypersubjectivity), to a bubbling tar pit (reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s Mud Muse), to my own video work repackaged as VHS tapes distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. Works like Recent Acquisitions: Tar Pit in Doorway and Recent Acquisitions: All the Money in the World hint at the relationship between the oil industry and a major funding source of visual arts in the United States: the Getty family.
The subject of Recent Acquisitions: All the Money in the World, is a facsimile of the severed ear of John Paul Getty III, the grandson of oil tycoon, J. Paul Getty. At the age of 16, in 1973, John Paul Getty III was abducted in Rome and held hostage by his kidnappers in rural Tuscany. A ransom demanding $17 million was issued to his grandfather, but the notoriously frugal J. Paul Getty declined to pay, arguing, “If I pay one penny, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.” Months later, the kidnappers mailed a lock of the Getty grandson’s red hair and a human ear to the Roman newspaper, Il Messagario, alongside a lowered ransom demand for $3.2 million. Ultimately J. Paul Getty offered the kidnappers $2.2 million, the maximum tax-deductible sum, and his grandson was released. John Paul Getty III later occupied himself with a short stint in film, including a role in Wim Wender’s The State of Things, while associating with Andy Warhol’s Studio 54 crowd in New York City. In 1981, John Paul Getty suffered from a stroke resulting from a combination of alcohol and drug abuse that left him quadriplegic and incapable of speech.
Recognizing this reference, or deducing a precise relationship between the works, is not critical to their reception. The string of referents that make up the content of the photographs function as a sub-register–there are paths to their access for invested viewers but an exact reading is not requisite. The works exist more expansively, not beholden to their subject matter but leveled by their insertion into the collection of UCR ARTS. Some of the other works, such as Recent Acquisitions: False Artifact or Recent Acquisitions: Artist’s Photographic Archive, represent the trajectory of my graduate studies, portraying lines of inquiry (such as an interest in pseudoarchaeology or museum display) that have ultimately cohered into my thesis.
By withholding the physical artworks and relying upon their photographic mediation, I am interested in weaving a mythology around my practice that supersedes objecthood or linear time. The selection of images within Recent Acquisitions, though derived from the present, intentionally dodge any hyper-legible markers of time. Inherently, through any image, the viewer becomes more distant from the truth–this body of work relies in part upon its ambiguous chronology as a means of slipping into the vernacular aesthetic of the museum archive. Likewise, the artworks' photographic mediation withholds a sense of physicality, precluding the objects depicted from being fetishized for their tactility.