SWITCHBACKS // DAMN THE DAMSEL ACT
This Will Hurt Her More Than It Hurts You
Enter the 36 chambers of Darla Jackson
by Heather Blakeslee
EXCERPT //
Jackson is a prolific artist who excels at series. In a mid-winter 2024 conversation, she told me she was still in production for an exhibition for Antler Gallery in Portland, OR, called “Enter the 36 Chambers” when another idea struck her. She had been making 36 birds that each represented “an emotional chamber to battle,” Jackson said. The title referenced “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, the Shaw Brothers film, and then also the Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) album—and then this idea I have of this path of, not enlightenment, but trying to get there. … It was a loose reinterpretation of my life, but … I felt like maybe anybody could relate.”
So with birds in her brain and a lot of Wu-Tang Clan on repeat, Jackson’s muse showed up.
“I had this idea for this four-finger bird ring,” she told me, a smile spreading across her face, “like, if Snow White had brass knuckles. I thought it was hysterical.”
Snow White’s brass knuckles topped with sparrows were a gateway into imagining an entire martial arts dojo full of weapons to be wielded by well-known princesses and folk heroines.1 “Cinderella had a glass slipper that was like a broken-off glass bottle,” Jackson told me. Rapunzel’s long, blond locks have been lopped off and braided into a whip, which is tied at both ends with a tiny, purple, satin bow, to near comic effect: something akin to having the same fist that may have just punched you in the face then blowing you a tender kiss.
“Elsa from Frozen had little snowflake throwing stars. Princess Jasmine, I took the tiger’s paws—they all had their little sidekick, and so I tried to incorporate them in some way or another—and those were turned into boxing gloves,” Jackson said.
For Ariel, that princess under the sea first memorialized in the Danish folk-tale The Little Mermaid, Jackson made a shiv with a pink coral handle and bent fork tongs on the business end, as well as another take on brass knuckles made from a sharp, pink shell.
“All my shows are weird, but this was especially weird. I felt like I narrowed my audience to, ‘Okay, you must like weird animal sculpture, Disney, martial arts—possibly—and bright colors,’” she laughed. When an “average sort of bro” started getting psyched looking at the pieces, she was surprised. She thought to herself, “Okay, you are definitely not my target market here, but I’m glad that you’re so excited!” //
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