Will Jacks

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MFA Student

Major: Photography

Graduation Year: 2020


Artist Statement:

Photography at its core is just the recording of time through the documentation of light. It’s taken me over twenty years to finally realize this, and to find ways of making that illustrate the power of photography’s foundations.

I enjoy challenging expectations, but my desire to find beauty in pattern often contradicts this. Pattern, after all, requires repetition, and repetition is the projection of the past into the future. This, too, is what defines expectations. Having lived in the Mississippi Delta for nearly fifty years I am conditioned by the echoes of atrocities absorbed in land shaped by enslaved workers. Disparity and racial strife linger in this region, and not a single person that spends time here is able to escape its weight. These are not patterns worth repeating. I’ve struggled to reconcile how I can love something and loathe it simultaneously. How do we break a pattern while finding beauty in its structure?

My work utilizes photographic principles to examine the role of individual gesture in shaping pattern. We never break fully from old ways, meanings, or even truths. We carry them with us and they can either become bouys of knowledge that propel us to better gestures or they can become nostalgic weights that hinder us from growth.

In order to find light, we need time. 


Biography:

After a short-lived tenure as a middle school English teacher and athletic coach, Will Jacks finally settled into a career as a photographer and documentarian. After finishing Journalism graduate studies at the University of Mississippi in 1996, he returned to his hometown of Cleveland, MS and opened a photography studio. Eventually, that grew also to serve as a regional photo gallery, and in September 2013, Time Magazine recognized its Eudora Welty exhibit as one of the top thirty ways in the world to experience photography offline.

He has taught in the journalism school at the University of Mississippi as well as the Art Department at Delta State University and now works with the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area in developing meaningful ways to engage with cultural interpretation of the region. He is currently an MFA candidate at the Maine College of Art with graduation scheduled for May 2020, and is the director of Jacks Farms Artist Residencies, a non-profit designed to engage contemporary artists with social, political, economic and educational issues in northwest Mississippi.

Will’s first monograph Po’ Monkey’s: Portrait of a Juke Joint documents cultural tourism in the Mississippi Delta. It was published by University Press of Mississippi in October, 2019 and was awarded the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters prize for photographic excellence in 2020.

https://portfolio.meca.edu/
https://portfolio.meca.edu/