“You Don’t Know Jack” is a group of drawings that incorporate bits of short accompanying narrative. The title of the series challenges the viewer to a game of figuring out Jack’s identity. But Jack’s story changes in the process of telling it. The collage of words gives the sense that Jack is not only a man of many possible narratives, but he is an elusive and maddeningly unspecific subject. The words have been changed, the face has been modified, we are presented with conflicting stories, so what can we know to be true? In the end, we’re forced to admit that representation presents an interesting conundrum. Pictures are static, but people are not; perceptions change, stories change, nothing is ever exactly as it seems. And, this shifting landscape of knowing/not knowing is ultimately familiar, a better representation of human experience because it presents a territory of shaky and insufficient knowledge that we can recognize as our own. So even though we know what we know, we still don’t know Jack.
The text reads: "Jack thinks he looks pretty sexy holding this fish, but he doesn't realize not everyone goes for his particular brand of macho".
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