Tomashi Jackson’s Projections

On Friday, August 7, from 9 to 11 p.m. (rain date Saturday, August 8), the Parrish Art Museum will present a 50-minute loop of five videos by its 2020-2021 Platform artist Tomashi Jackson, projected onto the south façade of the building. This unique drive-by experience will be visible from Montauk Highway.

The projected video collages, made between 2014 and 2017, derive from two distinct bodies of work. Three are from “The Subliminal is Now,” a visual representation of research on the history of American school desegregation. The artist drew from legal archives and photo documentation produced by the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund to contrast with present day cases of Black children, teenagers, and young people (including Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Aiyanna Stanley Jones), being brutalized and killed by police and vigilantes nationwide. All works in this series are anchored by music. In “Forever 21: The Essence of Innocence,” figures lip synch the background vocals of Luther Vandross’ “Give Me the Reason,” while the Doobie Brothers’ “It Keeps You Running” is the setting for “Self Portrait: Tale of Two Michaels,” and Maurice Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess” serves as a sound component to “The High Yellow Pavilion for Renisha McBride.”

Two pieces are drawn from “Interstate Love Song,” which addresses voting referenda in and around Atlanta that resulted in compromised access to transportation, thus preventing the expansion of public transportation and perpetuating deeply segregating residential patterns. The artist drew from conversations with Georgians about transportation policies and their link to a voting system also known as “The Rule of the Rustics,” and from Kevin M. Kruse’s book, “White Flight: Atlanta and The Making of Modern Conservatism.”

The projections at the Parrish — “Interstate Love Song: Rule of the Rustics (Krista),” 2017 and “Interstate Love Song: Stock the River with Piranha (Derek),” 2017— exist as photographic c-prints of key stills from each of the two video collages.

“I am thrilled to work with Tomashi to mark her presence at the museum this summer, during this interim when her exhibition ‘Parrish Platform: Tomashi Jackson — The Land Claim,’ scheduled to open this July, had to be postponed to summer 2021,” said Corinne Erni, senior curator of ArtsReach and special projects.

“While the circumstances surrounding this outdoor screening program for the Parrish Art Museum were unanticipated, the method viewing this series returns the research and reflection for these works back to the physical realm of public space,” said Jackson.

The projections relate to Jackson’s multi-faceted exhibition “The Land Claim,” addressing the historic and contemporary lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families on the East End. The project focuses on issues that have consistently linked past and present communities of color in the region: housing, transportation, and livelihood in relation to migration and agriculture. The 12-month phased project includes and online digital archive, a publication, and learning material slated for Spring 2021; and an exhibition at the Parrish in Summer 2021 that will include new paintings, video collages, and site-specific installations based on archival images and documents, original drawings, and transcripts of the interviews.

This unique drive-by experience is visible from Montauk Highway, with limited access for guests to park and watch the projections from the Parrish grounds. Guests who are registered to attend the Jazz on the Terrace concert at 6 p.m. on the same night are invited to stay to experience the projections.