Jackie Tileston

Jackie Tileston’s work references a range of interests from cultural hybridity to critical theory and non-ordinary states of consciousness, using abstraction as a language to mediate between the ephemeral and the physical. The paintings are heterotopic spaces in which recombinant strategies and nomadic thinking create complex images that investigate the contemporary sublime and states of being. The new work incorporates her practices in meditation, trance techniques and entheogenic experiences into experimental and conceptual processes based in automatic drawing, which the artist sees as exploring different forms of research and accessing knowledge.

Rooted in nondual tantric philosophy, the work embodies the idea that everything is an ecstatic manifestation of Awareness - consciousness appearing as this world, glorious, weird, and immanent. These paintings and drawings function as energy transmissions, like a tuning fork capturing vibrations – patterns of information and pulsing frequencies coalescing into forms, movements, and nothingness. These works can be seen as topographic maps of unknown realms, expressions of cosmic play, or the visual equivalent of sound waves emerging from a field of potential.

Tileston (b. Manila, Philippines) spent her childhood as an itinerant “Third Culture Kid”, living in the Philippines, India, England, and France, before moving to the US. She has a B.A. from Yale University and an MFA from Indiana University. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Dallas, and group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston), Art in General and the Painting Center (New York), and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art. Tileston is the recipient of the Core Fellowship Residency, the Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2004), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency (2005), the Guggenheim Fellowship