Visual Arts Gallery
Dale Jackson: The End (and The Beginning)
On view: February 23 - March 13, 2026
Closing Reception: Closing Reception: March 12, 5-7pm
Location: 700 Peavine Creek Dr. Atlanta, GA 30322
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 9am-5pm
The Emory Visual Arts Gallery presents an installation of text drawings by Cincinnati artist, Dale Jackson.
The Emory University Visual Arts Gallery presents Dale Jackson: The End (and the Beginning), an exhibition of new and recent work by Cincinnati-based artist Dale Jackson. Known for his densely handwritten text drawings, Jackson transforms memory, pop culture, and everyday experience into immersive visual fields that feel less like finished statements than ongoing narratives. Each page ends with the words The End, yet the work always suggests continuation.
Jackson has long been recognized for large-scale drawings made with ink markers on brightly colored poster board. Across these surfaces, he layers lists of cars, song lyrics, brand names, movie references, airline routes, and fragments of daily life. Motown and the Beatles appear alongside Pontiac models and grocery shifts, forming literary collages that read like an internal monologue: familiar, rhythmic, humorous, and unexpectedly moving.
Affiliated with Visionaries + Voices, the Cincinnati-based studio that supports artists with developmental disabilities, Jackson works with intense focus and repetition, often completing multiple drawings in a single sitting from memory. Each sheet stands alone while contributing to a larger accumulation that becomes a portrait of attention, what catches the eye and stays in the mind.
This exhibition also marks a significant shift in Jackson’s practice. Alongside his signature poster-board works are drawings on wood, plastic, and mirrors. These new surfaces alter the experience of his writing: grounded on wood, suspended on plastic, and layered over the viewer’s reflection on mirrored panels, where language and self meet.
Jackson’s work resists interpretation as a puzzle to be solved. Instead, it invites viewers to slow down, to experience rhythm, repetition, and the quiet power of accumulation. Typography, drawing, and poetry merge into a single visual language—an intimate record of a life observed from the inside out.
Every page may say, "The End". With Dale Jackson, it never really does.
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For press inquiries: Professor Dana Haugaard
dana.haugaard@emory.edu
Stephanie Dowda DeMer: Tell Us of the World
On view: March 19 - April 15, 2026
Opening Reception: March 19, 5-9pm
Location: 700 Peavine Creek Dr. Atlanta, GA 30322
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 9am-5pm
The Emory Visual Arts Gallery presents an installation by Stephanie Dowda DeMer.
T"ell Us of the World" is one of two concurrent exhibitions by Atlanta-based artist and current Emory Arts Fellow, Stephanie Dowda DeMer. The other, entitled Tell the World of Us opens at WhiteSpace Gallery Shedspace. Both exhibitions examine the eroding connections between humans and nature and the irrevocable aspects of this loss. Tell Us of the World creates a space of art as ecological research. The gallery becomes a lab for examining Dowda DeMer’s unique camera-less process for visualizing plant fluorescence and understanding the interdependent relationship we share with plants. Dowda DeMer’s practice extends into ecology, physics, and Emory’s Herbarium, with each investigative lens represented and intermixed with the epistemology of art.
Through a novel camera-less technique, I am documenting plant fluorescence to reveal the otherwise invisible luminous bodies of plants directly onto silver halide emulsions. Further photographic inquiry into ecological field studies makes visible ongoing research to understand our world. My sculptural cameras are creating durational in-gallery and garden chlorophyll prints that evoke a sense of reciprocity and conversation with light. Central to this project is the interdisciplinary connection with photo-scientific inquiry; the emergence of photography relied equally on communication within scientific communities and on experimentation in the metaphysical, to explore the permanence of the world and the language of the lens. In the midst of fallow curiosity, reigniting this relationship confirms our nature as guided by light.
For more information, please reach out to the artist, stephaniedowdademer@gmail.com or sdowda@emory.edu
www.stephaniedemer.com/tell-us
