Prior to his foray into photography, Thomas Jackson was a full-time magazine writer. Frustrated by the role new media was playing in journalism, and by the precision that writing required, he quit his day job and became a full-time artist (with his wife’s permission, of course).
In the years since, Jackson has shown in galleries throughout the U.S., garnered almost 50,000 Instagram followers (his neon-toned, cotton-candy-esque, jellyfish-like creations are undeniably Instagramable), and has just minted an NFT collection of his prints.
The crux of Jackson’s work is the climate crisis. He draws attention to human carelessness by photographing art installations against a backdrop of striking natural landscapes. Utilizing a combination of monofilament and wooden stakes dug into the ground, he suspends found objects and fabrics midair, creating striking optical illusions like plastic straws manipulated to resemble a bomb exploding and tutus arranged to resemble wildfire, to draw attention to our treatment of the planet. Below, the artist opens up about why he abandoned a decade-long career in journalism, why he chooses to highlight environmental degradation, and his recent segue into the NFT space.
Juno Kelly: You worked in publishing for 10 years before you got into photography. That’s a big career jump. What made you make the switch?
Thomas Jackson: I worked for Forbes. I edited a book-review section and wrote an electronic column from 1998 to 2008. I started [photography] while I was working at Forbes. I mean, it was a wonderful job, but I guess I wasn’t getting the traction as a writer that I wanted to. And I think I liked the idea of being a writer more than the practice of it. Whereas when I picked up a camera, there wasn’t so much resistance, and I felt something. It was something I loved doing as opposed to thinking about doing or thinking about having done. I was living in New York at the time, and it just sort of grew and grew. And then in the early 2000s, my wife and I bought a little house in the woods in upstate New York. And I started experimenting on our few little acres of land and making these installations and photographing them. And then 2008 happened and things started to change really fast in the publishing world. And I faced a choice of basically adapting and changing who I was as a writer and journalist or doing something else. And I chose to do something else.
“I faced a choice of basically adapting and changing who I was as a writer and journalist or doing something else. And I chose to do something else.”
JK: A lot of your works are designed to highlight climate change. At what point did you realize that was something you wanted to address?
TJ: I’ve always been interested in our relationship with the environment and how so much of how we live seems to be focused on separating ourselves from the environment, or transcending the environment, or rising above the environment, and creating these wonderful climatized places for us to live and nice, cozy clothes to wear and all that. But at the same time, we’re still part of the environment; no matter what we try to tell ourselves, we’re stuck here, and if we trash the place, then we have to live with that. And there’s no way we can buy our way out. So I’m very interested in that sort of dichotomy, that tension, and I explore that by taking objects and materials that we make out of petrochemical products and putting them in natural environments and creating this juxtaposition. I want the things to stand out and to be incongruous, but at the same time, I want them to go full circle and integrate and conform to the environment. And in doing so [I want them to] capture that tension of being of and not of the environment at the same time, as we are.
JK: How do you create these optical illusions—do you have a big team when you’re shooting?
TJ: I don’t. I generally don’t have a team. Honestly, I have worked with assistants many times, but on the majority of my shoots, I work alone. When I first started doing it, I did it with digital manipulation, at least partly, so I wouldn’t worry about creating an illusion in the camera because I knew that I could just remove whatever I didn’t want in Photoshop. But a point came—I think it was the comment of a fellow artist friend of mine who was like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if this was completely analog and you could create these illusions without any post-production?” So I set out to achieve that, and it took me a few years to figure out how to do it and which materials to use and what needed to be going on off-camera and within the frame. But I more or less figured it out. I decided that with each image, I wanted to do as little retouching as possible. And so with a lot of my images, if you saw a big print of them, or if you were standing six or eight feet away, the illusion would be there. But then if you go up to it and inspect it more closely, it starts to reveal its secrets, which I love. I like that if you’re curious enough, the process will reveal itself, because I love the process. That’s my favorite part. And lots of people over the years have told me that I shouldn’t talk so much about how I do what I do, but that’s boring.
JK: Most of the materials you use to create your sculptures are found objects, but lately you’ve been using a lot of tulle. How do you balance that with your environmental concerns?
TJ: In the past I have purchased a lot of it, but then I reuse it over and over again. That’s definitely a tension. For a lot of my work using these materials was part of the point—you know, to make sculptures out of plastic cups or plates. I want to confront the viewer with the objects that we surround ourselves with, which are so wonderfully convenient yet so destructive. But I think I’ve made my point about that, and I think it is time for me to use materials that are more sustainable. So that’s what I’m working on right now. But I also think that the struggles that we’re having as a society with the materials we use, those struggles are playing out in my work at the same time.
JK: One of your prints depicts hundreds of dollar bills suspended against a rugged background. What kind of message were you trying to send?
TJ: I wanted it to be about decadence. It’s another juxtaposition: taking something that’s very familiar and putting it completely out of context and taking out all the associations that money has—greed and capitalism, essentially—and putting it into this place where it has no relation. I didn’t really want to make a big point about capitalism; I just wanted to come up with a stimulating juxtaposition that would create as many possibilities as it could in terms of how the viewer would interpret it. I love the idea that as soon as an artist releases a work, it’s not theirs anymore. The meaning of it is out of their control. It’s sort of an experiment in that sense.
“I didn’t really want to make a big point about capitalism; I just wanted to come up with a stimulating juxtaposition that would create as many possibilities as it could in terms of how the viewer would interpret it.”
JK: It must be nice to just put your art out there and see what happens, compared to journalism whereby you have to be very clear on the point you’re making.
TJ: Yeah. And the other wonderful thing about the way I’ve created my work, particularly in recent years, is that I make it so that I don’t have to make all the decisions. The reason that I sort of try to collaborate with nature is that I don’t want to have to do everything because I don’t trust myself to make all the decisions. The idea of making a painting and having to completely conceive and execute the entire artwork is terrifying to me. I think part of the thing about writing that overwhelms me is that there’s infinite possibilities with the directions you can go and the word choices you can make. Whereas in my work, I go out with a certain amount of materials and I’m dependent on what the wind is doing, what the light is doing. And I have 10 to 20 sheets of four-by-five film. And that’s it. I like that.
JK: What made you decide to get involved in the NFT digital art space?
TJ: I’m keenly aware of the environmental critiques of that stuff, but I sort of manage that by doing it pretty minimally, not putting my entire oeuvre out there as NFTs. And I’ve balanced that issue with the fact that it’s so wonderful for artists in a lot of ways. Aside from just being an alternate revenue stream that any artist can use, what I really like about it is that there’s this direct relationship between the collector and the artist. It’s a new opportunity for artists to introduce themselves to a new collector base and to tell their story directly. To be able to go on Twitter and do a thread about an image that I made five years ago and tell the whole story about it with behind-the-scenes photos and process videos—it’s super fun and it’s a way for me to flesh out who I am as an artist. It creates this opportunity that will have a much broader impact than just the NFT market. It’s funny because I lived in the Bay Area for years, and one of the conversations that I had with so many people there was, “Why aren’t the people in tech buying art?” And it turns out they just weren’t that interested in buying prints. But now they’ve found something they’re really interested in. And that’s kind of cool.
