Jacks McNamara: Ancestral Imagination

Santa Fe-based artist Jacks McNamara develops their Ancestral Imagination in this immersive solo display. The exhibition uses painting and installation to explore the seasonal relationships and pre-Christian, Celtic pagan spiritual practices common to the artist’s European ancestors, whose descendants have migrated into the indigenous territories and high desert landscapes of New Mexico. Mythical plants and transcendent abstractions swirl together, offering emotive portals into the past and future.

For McNamara’s first solo show at form & concept, the artist was driven to explore the destructive and healing elements of our swiftly changing environments, their own solo practice of prayer and spell work, and their deeply personal exploration into their family lineage as an adopted child. Since the artist reconnected with one side of their biological family at the age of 21 and learned of ancestors who were poets and artists, McNamara has been intuitively delving into the ancestral influences that guide their often meditative artistic practice. “It’s a difficult thing to wish for what you don’t have,” says the artist. “I wish I had a coven or communal body of pagan folks and family that I was in practice with, drawing on shared ancestral traditions. And I don’t—I am a solo practitioner. And so these works have become the residue of what I’m exploring and imagining about the world, and about myself.”