The Dodd Galleries presents Through Service We Grow, a new body of work by Dodd photography faculty Blake Jacobsen. For nearly a decade, Jacobsen has been returning home to photograph his family’s truck repair business in Southwest Florida. For his first solo exhibition since joining the faculty at the University of Georgia, his latest project turns the camera away from his...
The Dodd Galleries presents Through Service We Grow, a new body of work by Dodd photography faculty Blake Jacobsen. For nearly a decade, Jacobsen has been returning home to photograph his family’s truck repair business in Southwest Florida. For his first solo exhibition since joining the faculty at the University of Georgia, his latest project turns the camera away from his own family and onto the mechanics who work at the shop. Following the recent passing of his grandfather, who started the business with the slogan “Through Service We Grow,” the work reflects on labor and service as paths toward self-determination and belonging. As the only male in his family who did not become a diesel mechanic, Jacobsen uses the camera as his own mechanical apparatus to document the shop as a site where masculinity is built, performed, taken apart, and never fully repaired.
Through portraiture, Jacobsen considers repair as both a literal and metaphorical practice: a way of attending to the fractures that form within families, within the self, and across race, class, gender, and sexuality. The photographs do not imagine repair as a clean resolution, but as an ongoing act of looking, laboring, and staying with what is difficult. In the faces and bodies of the mechanics, the shop becomes more than a place where broken machines are serviced; it becomes a space where tenderness, solidarity, and unfinished forms of kinship might emerge beneath the surface of work.
About the artist
Blake Jacobsen (b. 1993, Florida) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Athens, GA. Combining photography, video, and performance, Jacobsen’s practice explores the intersection of his queer identity and conservative upbringing while reconciling ideological differences within family, community, and self. Jacobsen’s work has been exhibited in galleries such as Gattopardo, The Fulcrum, and ltd los angeles, and has been collected by the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at LACMA. Jacobsen has been featured in Aperture, Hyperallergic, GAYLETTER, OUT, Physique Pictorial, and PAPER Magazine while his writing has been featured in Electric Dirt, a journal amplifying queer voices from Appalachia and the South. He received his BFA from CalArts in 2017 and MFA from UCLA in 2022. In 2017, Jacobsen co-founded PSLA, an artist-run space in South Los Angeles. He previously held multiple positions at CalArts, including Library Image Services Manager, Institute Archives Assistant, and Special Faculty in the Photography & Media program, and became a Lecturer at the University of Georgia in 2025.
For more information, contact Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator, Dodd Galleries and Atheneum: rachel.waldrop@uga.edu. The Dodd Galleries are open M-Fri in the main Lamar Dodd School of Art building, from 9am-4:30pm. The Lamar Dodd School of Art is closed on weekends, University holidays, and home football game days. See art.uga.edu for more information.
Through Service We Grow is supported by UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and The Lamar Dodd School of Art.
Image caption: Blake Jacobsen (US, b. 1993), Shop Scene, 2020, from Through Service We Grow (series), silver gelatin print, 24×30 inches, courtesy and copyright the artist
