Held Together

Mission in Arts presents Held Together, a solo exhibition by Jackson Hill. These layered, tactile paintings reckon with the quiet pressure of holding form in a world coming apart. Memory, collapse, and the impossibility of resolution haunt each surface—residue that refuses to clear. Figures remain suspended in acts of focus or care, surrounded by spaces that blur, erode, or harden. What emerges is not a scene of disaster, but the emotional sediment of continuing—of persisting in the presence of slow, ambient breakdown.

Jackson Hill (b. 1994, Boston, MA) received his BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland and briefly worked as a modeling and simulation analyst for the Navy before leaving engineering to pursue his art practice full time. He is a figurative painter known for psychologically charged work that examines the instability and dissonance of contemporary life. His paintings often hold competing visual logics in tension, drawing from memory, perceptual breakdown, and the intrusion of symbols or signals whose meaning remains unstable or inaccessible. While Hill primarily works in oil, his recent work incorporates site-specific found materials such as litter, wire, and bone, exploring how physical residue disrupts constructed space.

Hill’s background in science continues to inform the structural and conceptual grounding of his work, with a particular interest in how the collective pursuit of rapid innovation affects individual perception and psychological coherence. He is particularly drawn to the way large-scale systems can warp individual orientation—subtly reorganizing what feels possible, true, or meaningful.

Hill received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art, where he was awarded the KAWS and David Schafer Artists of Excellence scholarships. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.