Zg Gallery is honored to present Jackie Tileston’s latest solo exhibition, “Where We Are is Real,” in Chicago. An American artist born in the Philippines and raised across Asia and Europe, Tileston’s new series of paintings and works on paper delve into the confluence of both Eastern and Western aesthetics, crafting a visual metaphor that reflects her richly diverse multicultural upbringing.
In her exhibition “Where We Are is Real,” Jackie Tileston continues to draw from a broad spectrum of themes ranging from cultural hybridity and critical theory to non-ordinary states of consciousness. Utilizing abstraction as a medium, she seeks to mediate between the ephemeral and the tangible. The new body of work incorporates her practices in meditation, trance techniques, and entheogenic experiences into experimental and conceptual processes based on automatic drawing. The artist views this approach as a means of exploring various forms of research and accessing deeper layers of knowledge.
Anchored in nondual tantric philosophy, Tileston’s work embodies the notion that everything is an ecstatic manifestation of Awareness—consciousness manifesting as the world in all its glory, strangeness, and immediacy. These paintings and drawings act as energy transmissions, akin to tuning forks that capture vibrations—patterns of information and pulsating frequencies that coalesce into forms, movements, and even voids. This perspective celebrates Consciousness as the ultimate hyperobject.
Recently, Tileston has experimented with innovative methods to engage more directly with these energetic processes. Over several sessions, she layers veils of color, using the painting’s ground as a field where forms and hues emerge and dissipate. Following a trance breathwork session and meditation, she engages in automatic drawing with her eyes closed, creating a foundational layer that serves as scaffolding for the painting’s further development. Thicker layers of paint, bursts of color, and accumulations of forms gradually evolve into rich, intricate visual compositions.
These works can be perceived as topographic maps of uncharted territories, manifestations of cosmic play, or visual equivalents of sound waves emanating from a field of potential. In the lexicon of the supranormal, individuals who encounter non-ordinary phenomena are termed “experiencers.” Tileston invites her audience to become experiencers as well, encouraging them to open themselves to the expansive states of awareness from which her works originate.
Jackie Tileston earned her B.A. from Yale University and her M.F.A. from Indiana University. Her accolades include the Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France (2022), and the Surf Point Foundation Residency in Maine (2023). Additionally, she has been a resident at the Yaddo Foundation (2019), and the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2011) and residency (2017), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency (2005), the Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2004), and the Core Fellowship Residency at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1988-1990).
Tileston has held solo exhibitions in Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Dallas, and has participated in group exhibits at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, The Elizabeth Foundation, Art in General, and the Painting Center in New York. Her work is included in the public collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Art Museum of South Texas, the Rockford Art Museum, the West Virginia University Art Museum, the Jameel Collection in Dubai, and JP Morgan Chase.
