Artist and Curator Q&A: A Heron Amongst the Storm

John Reno Jackson sits down with Collections Curator William Helfrecht to discuss A Heron Amongst the Storm, Jackson's first solo exhibition at the National Gallery's Dart Auditorium Community Gallery.

About the Show:

John Reno Jackson: A Heron Amongst the Storm presents the work of emerging Caymanian artist John Reno Jackson in his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands’ Dart Auditorium Community Gallery. The exhibition includes a series of thirteen paintings and accompanying drawings that collectively chart the artist’s ongoing journey of creative experimentation and self-discovery.

As a painter whose work is rooted in the language of abstraction, the artist utilises this formal vocabulary to explore familiar subjects and the wider landscape of the Caymanian cultural experience. Reflecting Jackson’s sustained investigation of his chosen medium, the works on display capture the curious mind and wandering imagination of an artist whose probing approach embodies the frustrating, yet ultimately rewarding, path towards artistic expression.

Presented as a coherent body of work in which each painting seeks to unlock answers to a series of rhetorical questions—about the nature of representation, the tension between abstraction and figuration, and the ways in which meaning is ultimately understood and conveyed to the viewer—the artist’s images bear the marks and material traces of the process of their own creation. Less definitive visual statements than a series of painterly gestures, Jackson’s works exist in a state of perpetual flux—at the cusp of completion, yet decidedly open-ended.