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 culture they live in, which is capitalist and competitive. They focus on their personal experiences as a gay, trans, goth, southerner in juxtaposition to existing in capitalist American culture. Rainn works with performance, experience, video, collage, humor, and occasionally animation and sculpture. Rainn’s art philosophy is influenced by Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht. Collaboration is important to Rainn’s work; they seek to connect to others through creation of artworks. 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 fabricates rituals of false or satirical spirituality, and invites others to experience them either through participating or witnessing.
Recently, Rainn has begun practicing paratheater and clowning with a group called Experience Cult Research Group. 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 also 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.
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.