Visitors to the 2008 Liverpool Biennial may well stumble across a beleaguered George W. Bush grappling with a Rubik's Cube in the Tate Liverpool's café. Alison Jackson's new site-specific work, Bush with Rubik's Cube, continues to explore the themes that have preoccupied the artist ever since her days studying fine-art photography at London's Royal College of Art in the late '90s, after an undergraduate course in sculpture. Her master's show, Mental Images, comprised a series of grainy, black-and-white photographs taken in the style of celebrity-preying paparazzi snaps. The images then inspired Jackson's BBC miniseries, Doubletake, which won her a BAFTA award in 2002.

Fascinated by the media's exaltation of celebrity and the public's appetite for any glimpse into the lives of the rich and famous, Jackson creates titillating scenarios starring meticulously cast lookalikes. Her imaginary episodes — Prince William trying on the imperial crown, Madonna laboring over laundry — have appeared on gallery walls in Europe and America, and her fantasy-filmic encapsulation of Tony Blair's decade as prime minister, Blaired Vision, aired on the UK's Channel 4 last year.

It's no surprise that Jackson's work has courted controversy. In a perverse full circle, her images have been splashed across tabloids in earnest outrage, while other media outlets have celebrated her work, which has also appeared on the pages of Tatler and in an ad campaign for Schweppes.

Departing from the slippery world of photography, but still firmly entrenched in the realm of voyeurism, Bush with Rubik's Cube sees Jackson return to the solid forms of sculpture. Despite knowing better, the viewer, tacitly invited to share Bush's table, attributes myriad aspects of the US president — Texan cowboy, leader of the free world, and so on — to the waxwork. The piece becomes a fetish object in the same way that photographs embalm their celebrity subjects, revealing, as Jackson so relentlessly does, the exploitation of truth.

-Helen Holtom