MaricorMaricar Interview

Jackson Eaton’s second solo exhibition and first in Australia is a rich, visual exploration of intimate life and the experience of being an outsider. It is a story of love.

Shortly after moving to South Korea to teach English in 2006 Eaton met his love, Hasisi Park. This was the beginning of a joint ongoing project entitled Jackson and Hasisi Were Never Married – a body of work that was exhibited online and self-published in book format but never realised in exhibition form due to the couple’s break-up in early 2009. With oh +ve, Eaton looks back on a relationship, with a woman and a country, that spans nearly 3 years. The exhibition examines the pressure that needing one thing to constitute your ‘everything’ places upon a relationship.

“I titled this exhibition oh +ve, a name that suggests two opposing yet equally futile forms of finding answers in relationships. It cynically refers to both the self-directed method of maintaining a positive attitude and the deterministic theory of blood type compatibility. Not knowing my own blood type, Hasisi would tell me that if I were not of type B then we would never get married. O+ is the most common type in Australia.” – Jackson Eaton

For oh +ve Eaton has selected images that present in equal parts sensual, touching, comical, and haunting fragments of his intimate life and surroundings, inviting viewers to piece them together and explore the belief that ‘all you need is love’. At the exhibition opening Eaton will uncover his blood type for the first time.

This post was submitted by Jackson Eaton.