Jo Jackson's tranquil paintings suggest a unified and highly personalized polemic where beauty has its own organizational properties, and change is less a vague hope than a fully realized reality.Jackson's work proposes the possibility of an awesome and unconventional utopia where skulls stacked atop one another becomes a symbol of healing and solidarity, constituting not only a collection of heads, but more important, a pile of "collective minds," suggesting the atrocities of Auschwitz and Rwanda as well as the rampant commodification and consumerism of the modern world. Jackson is part of a new breed of artists whose works attempt correspondence with a larger political regime, and proposes a series of questions about personal responsibility and accountability.Jackson's palette is at once calming and jarring, a system of quiet, deliberate blues and browns alongside fluorescent pinks, creating a system of colors where light blue, brown and beige may appear in concert, yet they are "designishly untrustworthy." Colors seem to represent an emotional concordance or discordance (depending on the concept of the painting) with nature. People don't live in these paintings. Ideas do --icons, monkeys, jewels, graves, etc. Configurations of shape and color stand in for larger concepts, producing a higher awareness, peace and tranquility.