Alison Jackson

For the Canadian cyclist, see Alison Jackson (cyclist).
Alison Jackson
Born Alison Mowbray-Jackson
15 May 1970 (1970-05-15) (age 46)
Southsea, Hampshire, England
Education Chelsea College of Art and Design
Royal College of Art
Occupation Artist
Website AlisonJackson.com

Alison Jackson (born Alison Mowbray-Jackson, 15 May 1970) is a British BAFTA and multi award-winning artist who explores the cult of celebrity culture - an extraordinary phenomenon created by the media and publicity industries. Jackson makes convincingly realistic work about celebrities doing things in private using lookalikes. She creates scenarios we have all imagined but never seen before. Jackson comments on the public's voyeurism, the power and seductive nature of imagery, and on their need to believe. The artist's work has established wide respect for her as an incisive, funny and thought-provoking commentator on the burgeoning phenomenon of contemporary celebrity culture. Alison works across all media and arts platforms in television, digital, books, and is widely exhibited in galleries and museums attracting extensive interest in the press and on TV. Her images themselves have become just as much a part of popular culture as images of the real celebrities. Jackson has won a BAFTA for her BBC 2 series Doubletake and collected awards from 'Infinity', the Photographers Gallery, 'The Best of the Best' and 'Creative Circle' over the years. She has also published four collections of her photographic work.

Biography

Jackson graduated with BA (Hons) in Fine Art Sculpture from the Chelsea College of Art and Design as an adult student. Here she established herself as an abstract painter with a difference, completing a small number of critically acclaimed works. Soon after, in 1997, her graduation piece, Crucifix, was the first exhibit at A Gallery. It was priced at £1,500 and five years later it was valued at ten times that amount.[1] Jackson went on to gain her MA in Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art, London.

She became notorious in England in 1999 for producing black-and-white photographs including images that apparently showed Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed with a mixed-race love child. The photographs were part of her graduation series entitled Mental Images. She has gone on to produce similarly obscured photographs and films of celebrities using cleverly styled and convincingly realistic lookalikes in surprising or thought-provoking situations, portraying them, as she has described it, 'depicting our suspicions'.[2]

With reference to Alison Jackson's iconic image of Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed, Jackson says: "I started making work about Diana as a national icon at the time of her death. Millions mourned her through her image. Most of them did not know her in person; they only "knew" her through the media stories, images of her and TV. I thought I would make images of her, using a lookalike, to explore our perception of her and our fantasies about her love life."

Jackson was the artist behind BBC Two's series Doubletake, for which she won a BAFTA.[3] She went on to make mockumentaries for Channel 4 which included the depiction of George W. Bush and Tony Blair lookalikes in a series of 'behind the facade' scenes. Jackson also produced a film devoted to Tony Blair which coincided with his exit from office entitled Blaired Vision, shown on Channel 4 on 26 June 2007. On 1 April 2011 the artist launched an online celebrity news site in conjunction with the launch of her third book 'Up The Aisle', 300 images of her take on the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Her numerous replicas of the couple in various positions and settings went on display at London's Ben Brown Gallery. Alison is also developing a new series for American television.[2]

In October 2012 alongside Art Below Jackson presented her work at the exhibition 'Art Below Regents Park' in Regent's Park Tube station to coincide with Frieze Art Fair, one of the most important international contemporary art fairs that takes place each October in London.

She is also an Ambassador to the Spinal Injuries Association.

TV work

Films

Solo art exhibitions

Books

Opera

References

  1. ↑ Groves, Nancy. Jackson spent a couple of years developing her abstract painterly style and had a number of underground exhibitions. "The science of art", Newsquest, 13 April 2007. Retrieved 24 December 2008.
  2. 1 2 Garfield, Simon (7 June 2007). "The real Tony uncovered". The Observer Review. London. Retrieved 23 April 2010.
  3. ↑ "That's Blair and Becks! No wait...". BBC News Online Magazine. 18 December 2003. Retrieved 1 January 2010.

External links

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