Congratulations to the team at TERN Gallery! At EXPO Chicago 2025 (Booth 211) the Bahamas-based TERN will present vibrant work by John Reno Jackson (Cayman Islands) in conversation with Steven Schmid (The Bahamas).
Continuing TERN’s mission to support and to celebrate artists from the Caribbean and its diaspora and to present their work to the global art market, the Nassau-based gallery is presenting the dynamic practices of Caymanian interdisciplinary artist, John Reno Jackson, in conversation with Bahamian visual artist, Steven Schmid.
An MFA candidate at the Royal Academy of Art, London, and recipient of the Frank Bowling Scholarship, John Reno Jackson uses his painting practice to explore indigenous Caymanian culture. Through the investigation of flora, fauna and the ever-present changes to economy and landspace, Jackson is pushing past the tourist narrative of the Caribbean islands to unearth indigenous technologies and relationships between the locals and the land. His non-representational abstract works reference tools like the silver thatch broom, the technology of basket weaving, the combination of organic and man-made materials to create dimensions in the work while being steeped in western art history.
Living and working in Toronto, Canada, Steven Schmid is a Bahamian interdisciplinary visual artist whose practice centres masculinity in The Bahamas. Schmid’s current area of research explores how “play, free-styling and immediacy can become evocative and engaging methods of critiquing colonial notions of masculinity,” and his practice manifests into densely visual textured digital drawings, hand-transferred onto handmade paper. While Jackson uses his practice to weave materials and histories related to the Cayman Islands into his paintings, Schmid infuses his personal history—his partially-German heritage and the reconnecting to unknown relatives—into the tangible form of his work. His old receipts, letters, plane tickets and debris become pulp for the very paper upon which he transfers his digital composites, created from photographs, drawings, images of his own sculptures and other materials. Steeped in a reverence for hip-hop, Schmid’s practice uses the same sampling sensibilities to create his grotesque and alluring compositions.
Together, Jackson and Schmid approach abstraction from two disparate places but meet at the intersection of deconstruction and reconstruction. Jackson deconstructs the nuances of Caymanian indigenous culture and reconstructs it into two-dimensional patterned paintings. Schmid deconstructs the figure and materials and reconstructs them into wonder-filled and playful abstract figurations on handmade paper. The source material for both artists are either found in the landscape or through their personal histories.
Their new works, artist’s dossiers and CVs can all be found in the Viewing Room.
Also see https://www.terngallery.com/
[Shown above: 1) Steven Schmid’s This Must Be The Place, 10, 2025, acrylic, assemblage, colouring pencils, image transfer on handmade paper, 52 x 34½ in.; 2) John Reno Jackson’s bauxite red, 2024, acrylic, synthetic distemper, polypropylene wax, crylcem, silver thatch, and charcoal on canvas, 24 x 28 in.]
Congratulations to the team at TERN Gallery! At EXPO Chicago 2025 (Booth 211) the Bahamas-based TERN will present vibrant work by John Reno Jackson (Cayman Islands) in conversation with Steven Schmid (The Bahamas). Continuing TERN’s mission to support and to celebrate artists from the Caribbean and its diaspora and to present their work to the
