Ravi Jackson “Eye Control”

David Lewis Gallery

[Image: Ravi Jackson "Toby Michael" (2021) Acrylic, inkjet print, feathers on wood panel]

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David Lewis presents “Eye Control,” a group show curated by Ravi Jackson. This is Jackson’s first project with the gallery.

The exhibition examines the poetry and lyricism of the body, and the possibilities of performance across three different generations and forms of artistic practice. “The artists I chose made me think about looking,” Jackson says. “What looking at things means, how it’s performed, what shape it takes.”

“Eye Control” includes a new work by Silke Otto-Knapp, made especially for the exhibition, 1980s paintings by Ralph Humphrey, and four recent works by Jackson. Shown alongside Jackson’s symbolically suggestive work, Silke Otto-Knapp’s “Support” shows three dancing figures made from a prolonged act of looking, wiping, painting and repainting. Ralph Humphrey’s dynamic paintings seem to either start, or end, or both, with a view out of or into a window, simultaneously confronting the viewer’s body while suggesting dimensions beyond. “Eye Control” poses the question of performance and the gaze, the act of seeing and responding, of bodies as objects and loci of visuality in a rapidly transforming digital and visual age.

Ravi Jackson was born in 1985 in Santa Barbara, California. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received a BA from Oberlin College in 2007 and a BFA from Hunter College in 2012, before receiving his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013. Recent shows include PAGE(NYC) at Petzel, Petzel; Reassembly, Galerie Nordenhake. His work uses imagery and text from popular culture as a way to negotiate ideas about race, art, and sexuality.