Ashland Lock Co. (peer)

In her signature tooled leather works, Carol Jackson culls and transforms the advertising imagery she encounters on Chicago's streetscapes. Jackson replaces the catchy slogans and overwrought promises of commercial signs and construction-site billboards with her own texts and with phrases from classic literature. She paints and stamps the leather and sometimes includes collaged elements and other materials, thus adding additional layers of texture and imagery. For Ashland Lock Co. (peer) Jackson replaced text promoting a lock company’s services with excerpts from two epic poems: Milton's Paradise Lost and Homer's Iliad. She also stamped the work’s lush gold-tinted background to create an intricately worked landscape. This semi-aerial view, like an ancient map or tapestry, could be the site of a hero's epic journey: its sprawling space brims with potential aids or obstacles.