Jackson Daughety outside the old Holsum Food Products building in the West Bottoms, where he has his studio (photo by Jim Barcus)
The award-winning Kansas City artist probes discrepancies between fantasy and reality in a culture driven by power and money
With pop culture as his touchstone, visual artist and musician Jackson Daughety investigates capitalist iconography and its impact on our view of the world.
Like New York artists Julia Wachtel and Dan Colen, Daughety contextually reorients recognizable images from American culture to highlight their position in a society controlled by monied interests.
The 84 x 60″ “Forced Perspective” (2025), for instance, done in ink and acrylic paint on stitched canvas, combines the iconic image of Disney’s Cinderella Castle with military references. Fireworks creep toward the castle in threatening tendrils. It seems more like an archival photograph of a martial fortress than a celebration at a resort complex.
According to Daughety, the piece draws on cultural philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s idea of the hyperreal, which contends that ad fantasies and other corporate constructions — Disneyland, for instance — have come to replace our perceptions of what is real.
Other thinkers who have influenced Daughety include Michel Foucault, “who kind of helped explain how the functioning of society illustrates a system of values which we are tacitly agreeing with by not disagreeing,” he said. “Also Kafka, who I think was able to articulate really emotionally how frustrating and dehumanizing it feels to interface with bureaucracy and technology in the place of something more natural.”
Daughety has made deep dives into the internet subcultures living on the many iterations of 4chan as well as a gun forum on Reddit. (But that doesn’t mean he likes guns — he finds them fascinating as an outside observer. “I am from Texas, so I’ve seen it, been around it my whole life,” he says.)
In the 12 x 16” painting “Moist Critical Theory” (2025), a wall hanging of a bionic, militaristic toy, which served as the backdrop for the video game streamer MoistCr1TiKaL, looms forward. The male posturing of the image is “preposterous,” Daughety says, “there’s so much performance.”
“Camel” (2025), a 96 x 60″ work in ink and acrylic on linen that’s been printed, painted and stitched together, features hundreds of figurines of Jesus Christ in a shop window in Padova, Italy, based on a photo taken by Daughety’s sister. He recently posted an image of the piece on his Instagram with a caption including “Does the church take Apple Pay?? Can I vape in here??” The abundance of “Camel” is oppressive, but not without moments of relief and intentional places for the eye to rest away from the almost unintelligible onslaught of visual information.
Daughety’s more recent work is “a hybrid of inkjet printmaking and painting,” he says. “The fabric gets printed and painted before sewing; then it all gets sewn together after. Some are just painted too, where there is usually an image or video reference.”
Born in 1998, Daughety grew up in Dallas, Texas, before attending the Kansas City Art Institute, where he received a BFA in sculpture. His work has been exhibited in group and individual shows across the country and abroad. A 2021-2023 Block Fellow at the H&R Block Artspace, a 2018 Young Arts Merit award recipient, and the recipient of the 2017 Excellence in Art Award from the Dallas Art Dealers Association, Daughety has been featured in New American Paintings, Newcity Art, The Dallas Morning News, The Pitch KC, KC Studio, and recently in the May issue of Suboart, an international magazine for emerging artists.
His most recent solo show, “Large Margin,” at In Other News Gallery was almost entirely painting and inkjet printmaking, save for a piano in the corner of the room that seemed to play itself. He is currently part of three music projects: Sorry to Hear That, Jackson & Olivia and Spade No. 9. Daughety has an exhibit scheduled at R&D Madison in Madison, Wisconsin.
For more information, jacksondaughety.com.
