Focus

Focus: Ariel Jackson presents a trio of short videos related to what constitutes the “blues,” specifically the melancholic music of black American folk origin.

Using samples of music and images from television, Claymation and her own voice, multimedia artist Ariel Jackson takes viewers through a subjective history of the blues, and attempts to define the various emotions or states the term and genre evoke. Jackson’s videos, The Origin of the Blues, What Are the Blues and Blues Note: Feelings 01, each serve as a meditation on different aspects of the blues: who made them, the circumstances that created them and how they are experienced. These works explore the conditions of the blues—which evolved out of the trauma of slavery in the nineteenth century—as a state of being and as one of the most lasting cultural legacies of black culture.

The artist approaches these traditional themes with a distinctly Afrofuturist perspective that combines the aesthetics of science fiction with traditional African culture and music.

Exhibition overview from the Studio Museum website