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In the year 2184, if man is still alive

4/5/2023

Tom Jackson is a dazzling, versatile Iowa artist. He has worked in painting, photography and ink brush drawing. His abstraction works tend to become fascinated with geometrics. His realist works hang their hats in a wind-grieved America with which the artist seems nostalgically engaged. 

Carnivals, junkyards, highways, theme parks, motels, old-fashioned wedding trappings, pastries masquerading as animation, lemonade stands, giant roadside attractions, windows, wildflowers, and big skies are his milieu. The people who are also attracted to them are his kin. He can tell the tragic story of an American dream gone wrong in a triptych, like a cake left out in the rain. 

Jackson worked in commercial advertising for 20 years before he became a full-time artist when the millennium turned. He identifies with America, its currency and its promises — kept and broken. And his American visions seem to ride on his shoulder like some blessed Yankee leprechaun. Jackson’s good luck has given him inspiration to move all of his considerable archives out of a studio in downtown Cedar Rapids a short time before it was destroyed by a flood.  He also moved from a farmhouse studio in rural Linn County a few days before it burned to the ground. 

Jackson, a prolific artist, has not exhibited new work for five years. It turns out he has been immersed in the work of creating a graphic novel. It is no typical graphic novel either but 312 pages of 8.5 inch by 11.5  inch detail. At a show in Chicago’s cutting-edge Packer Schlopf Gallery, he was told he should do a graphic novel. He came up with the story idea and characters, did some drawings and teamed up with Iowa City writer Fritz McDonald, probably best known for writing the PBS documentary “North Carolina.” The result is “2184 ½” — a dystopian fantasy in the mode of George Orwell. 

“In 2016, it was clear that politics were becoming Orwellian, that freedoms were threatened and that, if nothing changed, the future America was going to be a mess. I noticed New Yorker cartoonists were having a crack at this, and I thought they were quite funny. I wondered about 150 years from now with things continuing unchanged. I spent one year just conceptualizing, then three years drawing full time. Fritz and I collaborated all the time because I had no story — just characters,” Jackson told us in March. 

CNA - Stop HIV Iowa

The hero of the book is a girl biker who travels about, in an America in which all travel is banned, to learn from the underground tribes who operate around a post-apocalyptic Denver. He and McDonald depict a nation where “protest has been reduced to a style show,” drones shoot darts to keep workers stimulated on double shifts, suicide becomes a stage show, and mosquitos are genetically modified to spread impotency. 

What were Jackson’s artistic inspirations? 

“Albrecht Durer, Toulouse, Goya’s grotesqueries, Rembrandt’s etchings, South African William Kentridge, and Anders Zorn, particularly his horizontal lines. All those were influences. I got the ventriloquist (in the story) from a friend who worked his way through law school with his act.”

What did he learn about process? 

“I did pencil drawings first and finished them with ink. The changes that brings about would have driven me crazy in traditional media. So I bought a tablet that has digital settings for all traditional media. That sped the process up tremendously. I learned a lot from YouTube videos.”

What is the future of this futuristic novel? 

“Fritz is a screenwriter. He read a lot of scripts working in Los Angeles, so that’s in play. Moberg Gallery wants a relative mural.”

Touts

Chris Vance’s annual show opens Friday, April 7 at Moberg. That is always one the city’s most entertaining events… On April 20, Joy Episalla and James Baggett will speak at the Des Moines Art Center about the legacy of Mark Lowe Fisher, an Iowa architect who died of AIDS in 1996 and arranged for his funeral to become a political parade in New York City on the eve of that year’s political elections. ♦

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