Jackson Hunt's paintings explore the relationship between personal memory, ancestral history, and the ways images carry stories across generations. Born in 1988, Hunt is a member of the Cherokee Nation and a descendant of the Klamath and Modoc tribes. Based in Los Angeles, he creates richly layered compositions that bring together painting, photography, and collage, transforming fragments of his family's photographic archive into new visual narratives. Through cutting, reproduction, and painterly intervention, Jackson questions how histories are recorded, preserved, and reconstructed, embracing the gaps and uncertainties that emerge along the way. His work moves between abstraction and figuration, allowing familiar forms to dissolve and reappear within complex surfaces that hold traces of both the past and the present.

In his Los Angeles studio, Jackson works with photographic imagery, collage, and acrylic paint, building compositions through successive acts of fragmentation and transformation. Drawing from his family's archive, he cuts, tears, and reconfigures images, reproducing and translating them into painted surfaces where gestures, colors, and overlapping forms create new relationships. Each intervention changes the image while preserving something of its earlier existence. Rather than treating photographs as fixed documents, Jackson approaches them as materials that can be questioned, dismantled, and reimagined. This process allows personal and ancestral histories to unfold through repetition, chance, and material experimentation, creating paintings that resist a single interpretation and invite viewers to consider how memory is continually reshaped.

In Aluminum (2025), Jackson constructs a densely layered composition of photographic fragments, painted gestures, and overlapping shapes that seem to shift between abstraction and recognizable forms. Muted browns, deep reds, and earthy tones are interrupted by vivid passages of blue and green, while pale, organic silhouettes appear and disappear across the surface. Sections of imagery overlap and interrupt one another, creating a sense of movement in which no single perspective remains dominant. Through this intricate interplay of collage and painting, Jackson transforms fragments into a visual narrative that remains deliberately open-ended. The work reflects his broader interest in how images can hold multiple histories at once, suggesting that memory is not a fixed record but an evolving process of reconstruction.

Jackson continues to explore the possibilities of painting and collage as forms of visual storytelling, expanding his investigation into memory, authorship, and the transformation of archival imagery. His work is included in VESSEL, a group exhibition curated by Sacha H. Cohen and presented by Sabbatikal at The KINN in Venice, California, from October 9, 2026, through January 16, 2027. Bringing together artists whose practices explore the body, materiality, and the traces of lived experience, the exhibition offers a compelling context for Jackson's work, where accumulated images and gestures become vessels for stories that resist a single, fixed interpretation.

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