Roche Jackson is a Southern California based mixed media artist whose work explores memory, identity, and the fragments of culture that shape who we become.
Before galleries, exhibitions, and studio practice, there was Los Angeles in the 1990s — graffiti-covered walls, skate spots, hip-hop, house music, and a generation of young artists creating their own visual language in the streets. As a Black kid growing up in predominantly white suburban environments, Roche found belonging through graffiti and skate culture: self-built communities where creativity, movement, and authenticity mattered more than where you came from.
Those experiences became the foundation of his visual vocabulary.
After years working professionally in graphic design and as an art director, Roche developed a disciplined understanding of composition, branding, typography, and visual communication. While design shaped his eye, his personal work remained rooted in something less controlled the instinctive process of painting, layering, destroying, and rebuilding.
Today, Roche Jackson creates mixed media graffiti paintings that function as visual archives of memory. Incorporating vintage print materials from the 1960s through the 1980s, spray paint, collage, and abstract mark-making, his work examines the relationship between nostalgia, consumer culture, and personal history.
His paintings exist between street art and contemporary abstraction, where recognizable imagery breaks apart and reforms into something more emotional and ambiguous. Recurring silhouettes appear throughout his work as symbolic figures not fixed characters, but fragments of memory that evolve across different bodies of work.
The process is physical and intuitive. Layers are added, removed, covered, and rediscovered. Each piece becomes a conversation between control and chaos, preservation and destruction, history and reinvention.
For Roche Jackson, art is a way of preserving moments that might otherwise disappear transforming personal experience, cultural history, and forgotten fragments into layered visual time capsules.
The Origin
The foundation of Roche Jackson’s work began with a visual language formed outside traditional art spaces.
Growing up around the energy of 1990s Los Angeles culture graffiti, hip-hop, skateboarding, and underground music he learned to see the world through fragments: hand styles on concrete, layered posters on city walls, worn advertisements, and the constant transformation of public spaces.
Those early experiences shaped the way he approaches art today. The act of layering, covering, revealing, and reclaiming became a process of preserving memory while allowing new meaning to emerge.
MOre Stories
-
From Canvas To Screen
Some places leave an impression long after you’ve gone home. For me, Antelope Canyon was one of those places. Like most photographers, I’d seen countless images of the famous light beams pouring through the narrow sandstone walls of this incredible slot
-
Before The Canvas
Long before I was creating layered mixed-media artwork, cutting intricate stencils, or building brands as a designer, I was just another kid chasing graffiti. Between 1994 and 1998, Southern California was experiencing what many still consider the golden years of hip-hop
