THE OPENING is all about introducing the fascinating, quirky and wonderful people working in and around the visual arts in Vancouver. Each week, we’ll feature an artist, collective, curator or administrator to delve deep into who and what makes art happen!

If you have had any involvement in Vancouver’s visual art scene in the last few years, you are sure to have run into artist and curator Jenn Jackson more than once. Though she has just left Vancouver in the last couple of weeks for snowy Banff and their acclaimed art centre, she was, most of the time all at once, working with Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver, Rennie Collection in Chinatown, Satellite Gallery downtown, Lucky’s Gallery in Mount Pleasant… and just to round out her time, you could find her cooking four days a week for Budgie’s Burritos. What drove this self-proclaimed ‘prairie rose’ to keep such a busy schedule? Well, in part because she is interested in the investigation and practice of systems and structures – and exposing herself to the order and disorder of as many systems as possible is part of the point.

For Jackson, it starts with the utopic institution. Created and organized to work in a certain way, many institutions inevitably collapse because people become involved. Every situation and human relationship cannot possibly be accounted for, and it’s those resulting slips that she finds most interesting. No matter what she’s doing – archiving documentation of artworks, curating an exhibition, making salsa – it is all part of an art practice that is also just her life.

One of the first questions I ask Jackson, on a rainy Saturday afternoon at Satellite Gallery, is whether she collects anything. As it turns out, she collects receipts, and has every single one since she started university. A fitting collection, as money is perhaps the largest modern system of them all. Some are kept in Ziploc bags, some in paper bags, and most no longer have any record of purchase left, the ink having faded from the thermal receipt paper. “I think they’re a reflection of my past as a banker,” she says. “Originally it was from a fear of being audited, and then it just became habit to keep them. One day I might put them all in a clear garbage bag, like a time capsule. A monochromatic installation.” The latter comment causes her to laugh – it all sounds serious, but Jackson is aware how silly it really is, and enjoys that too.

This leads to discussion of one of her most recent projects, which involved the collection of order notepads from her time as a waitress in Fort McMurray, Alberta. She had spent all kinds of money from a line of credit while in school in New York, and decided she wanted to pay it back in one summer. So in 2008, she worked for four months, seven nights a week as a waitress, and five days a week as a banker. She was so exhausted at the end of every day that she just threw her order notepads in a corner of her room and forgot about them. At the end of the summer the loan was paid off, and the order notepads were the only thing she had to show for her time there, so she just kept them.

“I loved it!” Jackson exclaims about the waitressing gig. “I was taught to read, write and repeat, never to use my memory, so there was no conflict with the customer.” She liked the idea of being put into a strict system to follow, and the human friction inherent in that – someone will eventually break the rules and create problems. Ultimately she scanned every page of the notebooks over an eight-month period, and began to organize them in 10×10 grids based on feeling. She has no memory of any specific order, and they lack dates, so there is no way of knowing what order they were really written in. The work is actually titled ‘Orders’; it genuinely feels chronological, so finding out it is not causes the viewer to try and find an alternate pattern of organization. Since the actual organization is just based on whatever felt right to Jackson, it is impossible for anyone else to really discern why she arranged the orders the way she did – again, the human, emotional friction that breaks down structures.

Ben Raymer ‘Wobably’ at Lucky’s Gallery

As mentioned, Jackson is not only an artist, but also a curator. She has curated all of the exhibitions at Lucky’s Gallery on Main St. since June 2010. All but one have been solo shows – in a city with few opportunities for emerging artists to really express their vision the way a solo show can allow, this is incredibly important. Equally important, and she understands this, is the relationship between curator and artist, and working together on shared ideas. All of the artists in all of the exhibitions at Lucky’s have been interested in the everyday human experience. So while this interest for Jackson manifests in her observation of structures, for Amanda Lye it meant finding meaning in the collection of small, inane objects and how we organize and justify this pluralism. Monique Levesque re-created the narrative of the daily televised soap ‘Days of Our Lives’ based on her own memory of watching the show growing up – an exercise in memory as much as an examination of how we incorporate entertainment narratives into our lives. Ben Raymer considered the act of viewing and the kind of information our brains ‘collect’ in a day, representing their fluidity in paintings that were ‘Wobably’ (as the title of the exhibition suggested, meaning probably wobbly) without the use of a traditional canvas and straight lines. And in ‘The Gift’, Jackson worked with these artists plus many more to give ‘gifts’ to Lucky’s in December 2010. The gifts, in the form of donations of artwork, reflected on the basic idea of gift giving, in particular when the exchange is one-sided and each gift comes with differing intentions.

‘The Gift’ at Lucky’s Gallery (feat.: Lucien Durey, Raymond Boisjoly, John Burgess, Ben Raymer, Les Ramsay, Andrea Lukic, Tiffin Breen)

‘The Gift’ at Lucky’s Gallery (feat.: Kurtis Wilson, Patrick Cruz, Monique Levesque, Erik Hood, Lucien Durey)

So whether it’s taking financial transactions at a bank, ordering beer for rig workers, cooking the beans for your favourite meal, or showcasing upcoming art, Jackson is prepared to do it all to investigate how it works between the structure and the human. Though she has left to become a (again, self-proclaimed) “snow kitty” in Banff, you can still catch her last show at Lucky’s, ‘Impossible But True’ with Raymond Boisjoly and Ryan Peter, up until April 13.

All photos courtesy Jenn Jackson.