Rainn Jackson is a queer, Appalachian, interdisciplinary artist, and leftist organizer from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Their work has been shown in various galleries and publications including Amos Eno gallery in Brooklyn, NY, Gallery Sabine in Chicago, IL, the Contemporary Cress gallery in Chattanooga, TN, the Apothecary gallery in Chattanooga, the Activist magazine, Chattanooga Zine Fest, Dalton Gallery in Atlanta, Dry Ice Gallery in Chattanooga, and Stove Works in Chattanooga. They are a MFA candidate at Louisiana State University.
Rainn’s art practice is centered around their response to the competitive, capitalist culture they live in. They focus on their personal experiences as a gay, trans, goth, southerner in juxtaposition to existence in capitalist American culture. Rainn works with performance, experience, video, collage, humor, animation, and sculpture. Rainn’s art philosophy is influenced by Marxist art theorists including Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodore Adorno. These theorists from the Frankfurt school believe art is capable of influencing and changing culture, and that art has revolutionary potential. Walter Benjamin’s short essay Capitalism As Religion, which compares capitalism to cult has had a strong influence on Rainn’s art practice.
Collaboration is important to Rainn’s work; they seek to connect to others through creation. Through their artwork, they hope to discourage competitiveness between artists and create work with the potential to change culture. Their performance work is experience based, and is typically in collaboration with other artists. Ritual is another central aspect of Rainn’s work; they seek to examine our cultural and personal rituals and the meanings behind them. Rainn is interested in the cause of spiritual experience, and seeks to fabricate rituals of satirical spirituality, and invites others to experience them either through participating or witnessing. They draw inspiration from christian traditions as well as pagan rituals in order to form rituals which question the cultic religion of capitalism.
Recently, Rainn has begun practicing paratheater and clowning with a group called Experience Cult Research Group. Paratheater is a form of theater coined by Jerzy Grotowski which has no audience; it is an experience between the participants. The purpose of paratheater is to observe our everyday masks that hide our true selves; paratheater momentarily removes these masks. Rainn finds clowning a powerful tool to explore queerness, failure, humor, and criticism of politics. Historically, jesters, which are an early form of clown, frequently made fun of political figures and had Jester’s Privilege, or immunity from retaliation. Clowning has a revolutionary potential to undermine the expectation of constant production and perfection expected by capitalism. There are similarities between paratheatre and the performative video work they do with Bea Hurd, who has been their collaborative art partner since 2021. Others who typically would not identify as performance artists have often been involved in participation in Rainn’s performative and video works. Rainn and their collaborators fabricate experiences together that are then turned into another, somewhat separate video piece. Rainn considers the experience of the participants performing to be the central work, and then the video work is derived from that experience.
Many of Rainn’s collaborative video works explore themes of gothicism and horror in relation to queerness. For Rainn, gothicism is a form of performance with exaggerated fashion and aesthetics. Gothicism has been an important space for Rainn to acknowledge trauma, including those inflicted systematically which is not acknowledged by mainstream society. This aspect of gothic subculture makes it popular among LGBTQ people and other minority groups.
In addition to collaborative work, Rainn also creates solo artworks in the forms of video, collage, and 3D animation. In their solo work, they continue to explore themes of queerness, gothicism, and southern culture. They are also interested in technology and the potential benefits and drawbacks it provides culture. Defining technology broadly, they consider anything created by humans to make life easier a form of technology including medications, computers, tools, AI, etc. Rainn connects digital technology imagery to the transgender experience, and likens hormone replacement therapy to cyborgism. Through their artwork, Rainn strives to imagine the full potential of creativity without the limitation of creation motivated by profit.