Jackson Klie Bent Atlas

We bend under the weight of images, anxious for a resolution, like the disgraced figure forced to bear the weight of the earth on his back. In Jackson Klie’s exhibition Bent Atlas, photographs are repositioned as queer objects—malleable diffractions, alive with potential. Acting out a “semiotics in drag” through the recombinant processes of collage and assemblage sculpture, his works suggest that photography and archives are sites of ritual and magic. Simultaneously working with and against a photographic understanding of knowledge, which aims to compartmentalize the fluid abyss that is everything-in-the-world, Klie’s work de-categorizes our presumed relationship to images. Processes of standardization, such as the photographic grey card, and photographic errors, such as the moiré effect, come into contact with a queer coded sensibility—embracing the dis/continuity of the photographic frame.