THE BURDEN OF INVISIBILITY
VERONICA JACKSON
On view: February 2 - March 25, 2023
ABOUT THE EXHIBIT
The Burden of Invisibility
by Veronica Jackson
What does it mean to be invisible? How does the designation of invisibility affect my identity and sense of self? These are two of the many internal queries that arise from my plight as a Black woman living in America. They also provide context for the title of this body of work.
The Burden of Invisibility is autobiographical and stems from my position as a Black woman marking space. It reflects my multidisciplinary visual art practice based on an interpretive exhibit design and architecture career spanning more than three decades. Simply put, this project tells stories using a range of quotidian objects such as felt-bulletin boards, broadsides, timecards, photographs, and text.
Encompassing a constellation of individual yet integrated works of art, The Burden of Invisibility displays efforts employed to combat an environment indoctrinated to view me through a singular stereotyped lens, or not see me at all. The following installations not only look at African American women’s invisibility, but also address their hypervisibility—an exaggerated visibility—subject to misidentification and mislabeling. Thus the term burden: something carried or that which is saddled with difficulty and obligation. Upon mislabeling, invisibility and hypervisibility were carved into the recesses of my mind like grooves in a vinyl record. They are burdens that I will perpetually carry, be obligated to hold onto, and resultantly respond to via my visual art making practice.
Although available for all who want to approach it, The Burden of Invisibility is dedicated to Black women—a group historically disenfranchised in American society. These artworks visually illuminate the methods in which African American women are valued or devalued within our society, and how these attitudes affect their sense of agency in constructing their own imagery or endeavors to mark space.
Learn more about the artist and this body of work through this video from Virginia Humanties:
EXHIBITION
ARTWORKS
All images courtesy of the artist.
VERONICA
JACKSON
My work is autobiographical, stems from my position as a Black woman marking space, and responds to the travails of my ancestors. I have a multidisciplinary visual art practice based on an interpretive exhibit design and architecture career spanning more than three decades. I tell stories using quotidian objects such as felt-lined bulletin boards, clothing, hair, handmade paper, timecards, and text.
My background encompasses the critical examination of visual culture. As an artist, I record, interpret, and make aware the complexities in which humans exist and affect their social surroundings. As an architect and designer I creatively solve problems related to the structural systems within virtual and built environments. My visual art making practice is a combination of past professional disciplines, present lived experiences, and the cache of contemporary and historic research accumulated. My initial and ongoing project—The Burden of Invisibility—is the physical manifestation of my evolution from designer to visual artist, as well as a reaction to the world around me.
My artwork is also grounded in the belief that studying visual culture is a transformative experience. As an emerging cultural producer with a social justice practice, my goal is to engage audiences who may benefit from the ways visual culture incites the imagination to see the world differently, and eventually empowers and provides them the agency to creatively contribute to it.
Photo credit: Jean Wibbens Photography
This exhibition is supported, in part, by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Statewide Program.
This exhibition is also supported in part by the Virginia Commission for the Arts, which receives support from the Virginia General Assembly and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
