John Stezaker
Horse, 2013
HD video, 2:13, on infinite loop
Courtesy Petzel Gallery, New York
Jackie Nickerson: August
The National Underground Freedom Center, Cincinnati
Oct 1, 2016 – Jan 23, 2017
Jackie Nickerson
Ruth, 2012
Digital c-print, dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Jackie Nickerson’s dignified portraits of African farm laborers are alive with perceptions of the physical and psychological impact of the surrounding agricultural landscape and the raw materials cultivated there. Nickerson’s first body of work, Farm, was made over a three-year period in rural locations across southern Africa. Farm concentrates on how individual identity is improvised through clothing, expression, and attitude. Nickerson’s latest body of work, Terrain takes a broader view, focusing on laborers in relation to their environment and the raw materials cultivated there. In an interview for Cult magazine in 2013, Nickerson said, “Terrain is about us in the landscape, how we change the world we inhabit at every moment of our being human, and how, for better and for worse, the world that we make…changes who we are.”
Jackie Nickerson was born in Boston in 1960 and divides her time between Ireland and southern Africa. Nickerson was commissioned by Time to travel to Liberia to photograph the 2014 Person of the Year: The Ebola Fighters.