The Pit is pleased to introduce a new series of ARTIST SPOTLIGHTS offering an in-depth exploration of artists' practices within our program and with upcoming exhibitions at the gallery.

EXHIBITING ARTIST:  ROXANNE JACKSON

Roxanne Jackson is a California-born, New York-based ceramic sculptor whose practice dismantles conventional expectations of the medium, transforming clay into feral, metamorphic forms that collide mythology, nature, and the grotesque. Working from both highbrow and lowbrow cultural references, she subverts functional ceramic traditions — vases, candelabras — by infusing them with a distorted personal mythology, producing objects that resist singular narrative and oscillate between beauty and monstrosity, absurdity and menace. Her technical process mirrors geology: through layered raw materials, multiple kiln firings, and the manipulation of heat and fluxed glazes, she achieves complex, lustrous surfaces that echo the elemental properties of earth itself. Her work has been exhibited internationally and reviewed by the New York Times, the New Yorker, Sculpture Magazine, and Hyperallergic, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and the Gardiner Museum in Toronto.

Jackson's most recent solo exhibition "Unknown Giants" at Anton Kern's WINDOW gallery in New York (2025) explored the mysteries and myths of the sea. The standout piece, Crystal 2023, a multi-part eight foot long water serpent with a unicorn horn and painstakingly intricate scales, took up the majority of the view from the sidewalk. The exhibition was featured in a review by Seph Rodney for Hyperallergic. 

IN THE STUDIO

Kay Whitney for Sculpture Magazine described Jackson's sculptures as “brilliantly inventive: sinister, disturbing, and hilarious in the same moment. By asking how we can reclaim monstrosity, Jackson’s work becomes an explosive combination…extracting and exploiting the tissues that bind the sexual and the grotesque.” 

"Artists have been talking about the dichotomies, or the tensions between, beauty and horror for a really long time...Showing both of these extremes [offers] a more honest depiction of the human experience."

Roxanne Jackson (From the Clay in Color Podcast interview called "Following Your Guts with Roxanne Jackson" with Alex Anderson and Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, 2024)

In the studio, Jackson works across a wide range of ceramic techniques rather than adhering to a single method, exploiting clay's malleability through building, distorting, and layering. Her influences are surprisingly wide — they include John Carpenter's classic horror film The Thing, ancient and modern mythology, her years as a river guide, and an undergraduate degree in botany — all of which surface in her recurring use of natural forms: fruit, shells, fungus, animal parts. Her glazing process is where the technical rigor becomes most visible. In his review of her Anton Kern exhibition Seph Rodney writes, "The variety and nuance of the glazes, some of which require being fired multiple times at different temperatures, yield a bevy of creatures that look like grotesque phantasms and things you might find in your backyard. And the level of detail is gorgeous." The result is work produced by an alchemist of clay and color, whose nuanced, layered surfaces replicate textures as specific as silver-scaled aquatic skin — the outcome of painstaking material control in service of mythological world-building.

CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY CERAMICS GUEST ARTIST AT CSULB

Formally established in 2017 based upon activities stretching back decades, the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University Long Beach (CSULB) is a combined entity and site committed to the mission of fostering exchange, inquiry, creative production, and learning beyond the curriculum among CSULB Ceramic Arts faculty and a highly diverse group of students, visiting artists and scholars, and Guest Artists who work on site as volunteer participants in the learning/making community, with a goal of inspiring and empowering all participants to expand the limits of their own practice and work to the benefit of both the participants in the community and the broader community and field of contemporary ceramics.

Over 240 artists and scholars have participated in the programming over the years, delivering guest lectures and demonstrations, working in residence as Guest Artists, and working on projects, both on and off campus, with the assistance of Ceramics Area students, staff, and faculty.

This summer Roxanne Jackson is participating as a Center for Contemporary Ceramics Guest Artist. She is using her time in Long Beach to complete works for her upcoming exhibition at The Pit Los Angeles.

CSULB will host Jackson's public artist lecture on campus in the fall. Details and date to come!

UPCOMING EXHIBITION AT THE PIT

Jackson will have a solo exhibition at The Pit, Los Angeles this September, her first exhibition in her home state of California. The exhibition title "OVUM" comes from the latin word for egg. With the works in the show being varied—including lizards, snakes, birds, and mythical hybrids like harpies—OVUM encapsulates the aforementioned creatures being hatched from an egg, as well as the delicateness and vulnerability of the ecosystem. Of the works in the exhibition Jackson notes, "I’m fascinated by the concept of precocial species—creatures like reptiles that hatch and immediately strike out on their own. This highlights a stark neurological divide between the nurturing limbic system of mammals and the survival-driven reptilian brain. What are the evolutionary implications when offspring require zero nurturing and are biologically 'hard-wired' to hunt from day one?"

"Everything is a shape-shifter, just at different rates. I use the laterally sliced head to bridge the gap between biology and geology — moulding the animal form into a mineral or a fossil. This dissection serves as a metaphor for deep time, showing that death is not an ending, but a slow transformation into a metamorphic object that outlasts our brief animal lives.”

Roxanne Jackson

Roxanne Jackson was born in California’s East Bay and currently lives in New York. Press for her work includes the New York Times, the New Yorker, the LA Times, Juxtapoz Magazine, Hyperallergic, Sculpture Magazine, Forbes, Metal Magazine, Cool Hunting and Ceramics Monthly, among others. She has attended residencies at Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Koka City Shiga Pref., Japan; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; the Center for Contemporary Ceramics, California State University Long Beach, CA; Plop Residency, London, UK; the Ceramic Center of Berlin, Berlin, DE (funded by a Jerome Project Grant); and the Pottery Workshop, Jingdezhen, China (funded by an NCECA fellowship). Selected museum exhibitions include the Arter Museum, Istanbul, TRKY; the Schloss Museum, Linz, Austria; Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia, PA; the Grassi Museum, Leipzig, DE; and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts and Design, NY, NY and the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, CAN. Selected New York City exhibitions include Anton Kern Gallery, The Armory Show with Night Gallery, The Hole, R & Company, Underdonk, Elijah Wheat Showroom, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Sardine, Dinner Gallery and Frieze Art Fair. Other exhibitions include The Pit and Sargent’s Daughters, Los Angeles, CA; Brigitte Mulholland Gallery, Paris, FR; David Lewis Gallery, East Hampton, NY; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; Louise Alexander Gallery, Sardinia, ITLY; Duve Berlin Gallery, Berlin, DE; Public Gallery and Cob Gallery, London, UK; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL; and Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City, MX. 

SELECTION OF NEW WORKS