ILLUMINATIONS

Suzanne Jackson captures the transformative power of light.

- HILTON ALS

"South of Pico," by Kellie Jones-a 2017 book about a circle of Black artists in Los Angeles in the nineteensixties and seventies-is a landmark work and a great gift to contemporary art history. Among the many things I admire about Jones's text is what she doesn't do in it: obscure the fascinating and vital works and lives she examines with fashionable but ultimately draining theoryspeak. Instead, like a latter-day Vasari, Jones creates a tangible world in which her subjects the spellbinding Senga Nengudi, Alonzo Davis, and Maren Hassinger among them-display the energy and purpose of creators whose activism is expressed through their work, and who believe in community, artistic and otherwise. One of the artists Jones's book introduced me to was the inventive and spiritually astute Suzanne Jackson, whose uplifting show "Light and Paper" (at Ortuzar Projects) has little to do with oppressive power structures and everything to do with the joy of making and the transformative power of light.

Jackson, who is eighty, came of age as an artist in a Los Angeles that was far from the center of the art-world grid, and you can see, in some of the earlier works in the show, how the area's expansive landscape and desert skies influenced her practice. There are eleven pieces on display at Ortuzar, all produced between 1984 and 2024, and there isn't one that doesn't revolve around light and how to represent when looking at Jackson's work: natural light does not sit still, and whenever your eye tries to rest on it-in the corner of a room, in a garden, on the pages of a book-it shifts and changes, changing your perspective, too.