About PM/AM
PM/AM is a London based contemporary art gallery, residency program, and incubator whose mission it is to reflect how we engage with art today. Dedicated to growing and nurturing emerging talent, as well as gaining exposure for artists without formal U.K. representation, the platform has organised exhibitions globally and events across its home city, using a flexible space model to accommodate the diversity and dynamism of the artists’ practices they showcase. It also has two permanent locations—one central, one west.
PM/AM has a reputation for discovering and helping to launch the careers of some of the most exciting contemporary artists of today. While its focus is on international talent, it also has a keen interest in UK based artists coming out of the country’s leading art schools. As well as maintaining a traditional exhibition programme, PM/AM is dedicated to finding new ways of working with the artistic community, expanding upon its shows with events, ongoing residency projects, and pilot schemes designed to connect collectors with the artists they love.
The London residency is of particular focus, further cementing the gallery’s commitment to growing and shaping artists’ careers by giving them a space to create and introducing them to the local artistic community. Rather than following the accepted representation model, PM/AM aims to facilitate ongoing support for the artists it works with through instinctive management beyond and outside of exhibition and residency collaborations.
PM/AM has been featured extensively in the press, garnering coverage from leading publications including The Times, Art Forum, The New York Times, Independent Magazine, The Guardian, Vogue, Vanity Fair, The Face, Dazed, Hyperallergic, Elephant Magazine, The Financial Times, Juxtapoz and Purple Diary.
Exhibition Text
In Caroline Jackson’s abstract paintings the viewer is welcomed into a network of captured moments, where the performative artist’s decisions and movements are imprinted onto the canvas in a strangely intoxicating web. Concentrating mainly on larger format work, the space offered presents an opportunity to engage the whole body in motion, resulting in highly expressive and boldly constructed work.
Created on a residency in London earlier this year, this body of work was subject to a time limitation that required a more assertive and decisive process. Such urgency reduces the potential for strokes to be rectified, and in the work this urgency shows as vibrancy, as energy. It also requires an acute sense of intuition in the way a work comes together, from its inception to the point where it is considered complete. Caroline does not produce preliminary sketches, nor does she refer to existing imagery; the elements that make up her paintings emerge into immediate finality.
Despite a freeform approach to painting, a keenness to incorporate ideas of balance and harmony lies at the heart of Caroline's work. A square canvas with a notable use of bright yellow, for instance, appears to present a dialogue between background and foreground - enhanced by patches of raw canvas in the corners - and surely supplying the notion of something floral in the minds of some viewers.
In another work we’re faced with a rather more epic, metaphysical realm that appears to embody a sense of fluid motion. The specifics of Caroline’s techniques come into play here. This work, in contrast to the ‘floral’ piece on raw canvas, sits atop a primed surface that creates subtle slippages in the paint, magically enshrining their histories of miniature interactions into the scene. These infuse a sense of magnificence, of the supernatural, into the work, like a dream half remembered or place that is felt but may not exist. In this work we could be looking at a depiction of Heaven and Hell, with Purgatory suspended between.
A unifying characteristic of Caroline’s work is the almost existentialist questioning of the painting process, the materials, the associations and interpretations of a work. She creates the conditions to find solutions, but leaves the solutions themselves open ended. Her imagery is made and broken, fixed, and broken again - layering ghosts of paintings within paintings - seeking out the feeling of conclusion that human beings crave.
This work, however, is confident in the assertion that conclusion is theoretical or at best subjective. Instead, the freedom of abstraction is elevated to a point where answers are unnecessary and superfluous, and the painting itself can satisfy us in ways that eschew the need for words.
- Daniel Mackenzie, March 2023
CV
Caroline Jackson
Born: 2000, Hastings, United Kingdom.
Lives and works in London.
Education
2018 - Foundation Diploma. East Sussex Coast College.
2022 - BFA. Slade School of Fine Art.
Exhibitions
2023 - Friends Indeed, San Francisco.
2023 - Taymour Grahne, London.
2023 - PM/AM, London.
2022 - Samuele Visentin, London.
2022 - Slade School of Fine Art, London.
2022 - Samuele Visentin, London.
2022 - Sim smith. London.
2022 - Guts Gallery, London.
Residency
2023 - PM/AM, London.
Collections include
Aki Abiola
Jane and Roland Cowan Collection
Pippy Houldsworth
HSBC Collection
Alex Klimt
Zelie Walker
Sim Smith
