Review of Jacob Jackmauh: “Admissions”
Installation view of Jacob Jackmauh: Admissions. Courtesy of Parent Company, images by Gustavo Murillo.
Jacob Jackmauh’s solo exhibition Admissions at Parent Company plays with the incessant gaps between the prices paid for entering the symbolic economy of nostalgia and its exclusion of fantasies no longer afforded with the same degrees of psychical potency or plainly a raison d’être. Throughout the exhibition, what proliferates is an alternative system of signs that transfers and translates visual pleasure associated with revisiting and recycling a given object of consumption or devotion yet always already obfuscates every act of reification’s fullest capacity. In each twist and turn, we encounter objects suspended at the threshold between amnesic falloff and ghostly return. The exhibition animates melancholic material that continues to reengineer itself, leaps through times, reaches nowhere, and plunges into the depth of our identification with objects we intimately know or do not know. Admissions works alongside the revelation that cultural production as a system of modeling and modulation can only produce what is fed by our imagination and projection, that it lacks ground for making any sign anew, for there is no distinction between copy and original, and therefore what is singular and derivative of mass production.
Jacob Jackmauh, R143 Caesura (2025). LED matrix panel, animation, 5 x 29 in. Courtesy of Parent Company, images by Gustavo Murillo.
R143 Caesura (2025) is a custom-programmed LED panel that replicates with high verisimilitude a pre-9/11 cityscape animation found on informational screens on L trains, which is said to stay as long as the screens are there due to technological obsolescence that renders upkeeping impossible. But failure in maintenance is beautiful: the image of cityscape flashes for less than one second, eluding commuters’ conscious attention yet affecting micro dynamics of their environment, however marginal it might be. R143 Caesura flutters ambivalently in the darkly lit basement that is the gallery space—one could not help but look to Freudo-Marxism, comparing the space to the unconscious or the material base, sites where activities of rearranging spatial or temporal relations are most abundant—and its every flicker gestures toward the limit of trafficking commercial graphics and its communicative efficacy, a limit only made legible by another rupture in which the pace of history has outlived the image that sustains history. Appropriating the conspiratorial frenzy readily available to below-ground spaces and lapsed archives with no real referent, the artist edges the uneven speeds of circulation and production. What it engenders is a surface where the stakes are both high and low, a time shock and a poetic refrain.
Jacob Jackmauh, 2025 (2025). Resewn polyester inflatable decoration, hand stitching, fan, LED lights, voltage regulator. 52 x 23 x 19 in. Courtesy of Parent Company, images by Gustavo Murillo.
Two inflatable sculptures, 2025 (2025) and Every Occasion (2025), take up space without really taking up spaces. Resewn inflatables that once timestamped a celebratory event become haunted, contextless dreamscapes, cul-de-sac of ideologies, akin to Paul Chan’s inflatables about democratic antagonism or Tony Oursler’s inflatables about cinematic bodies. They are pure surfaces without interiority in spite of the appearance of having one. Their two conceptual opposites are Seeing The Elephant (2024) and Driving (2025), factory molds—their hollowness initiates the chain of reproduction—that have ceased to mean anything other than the absence of what it signifies. Is this pure interiority or a coup de grâce to the idea of completeness in cultural production?
Jacob Jackmauh, Every Occasion (2025). Resewn polyester inflatable decoration, hand stitching, fan, LED lights, lighting gels. 45 x 86 x 25 in. Courtesy of Parent Company, images by Gustavo Murillo.
Jacob Jackmauh: Admissions was on view at Parent Company from February 13 to March 29, 2025.
