Matthew Day Jackson

Matthew Day Jackson (born 1974) is an American artist whose multifaceted practice encompasses sculpture, painter, collage, photographer, drawing, video, performance and installation. Since graduating with an MFA from Rutgers University in 2001, following his BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, his numerous solo exhibitions have marked him out as one of the most inventive and thought-provoking artists of his generation. His work has been shown at MAMbo Museo d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, Italy; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA; the Portland Museum of Art Biennial in Portland, Maine; and the Whitney Biennial Day for Night in New York.

Work

Jackson’s art grapples with big ideas such as the evolution of human thought, the fatal attraction of the frontier and the faith man places in technological advancement. His work particularly addresses the myth of the American Dream, exploring the forces of creation, growth, transcendence and death through visions of its failed utopia. Recent work expands on these underlying ideas inherent in the American mythology and focuses on the plurality of this mythology pointing to its existence outside American Culture. Individual sculptures and paintings interconnect with each other to create complex scenarios that revisit history and reassemble its narratives. His work is frequently monumental, imposing not only on a large scale physically but also conceptually, occupying an intellectual terrain that reaches from ancient history to Outer Space exploration and discovery.

His works utilise a familiar iconography, recycling culturally loaded images such as the geodesic structures of Buckminster Fuller, mankind’s first steps on the moon, and the covers of LIFE magazine from the ’60s and ’70s, cross-pollinating these and mixing them with numerous references from art history. Jackson depicts these using the world around him: scorched wood, molten lead, mother-of-pearl, precious metals, formica, and found objects such as worn T-shirts, prosthetic limbs, axe handles and posters, for instance. These diverse materials resonate with symbolism, combining apocalyptic elements with the fruits of new technologies, historical imagery with contemporary ingredients. In his art ideas are granted physical form, and it is in the clash between the two, in the material impact of idealist thought, that it derives its force.

The critic Jeffrey Kastner has noted that his works locate ‘startling beauty in their counterintuitive material juxtapositions.’ However for Jackson beauty is frequently partnered by desolation. His work explores a concept that he terms ‘the Horriful’, the belief that everything one does has the potential to bring both beauty and horror.

External links

• Hauser & Wirth
• The Chinati Foundation | Artists in Residence | Matthew Day Jackson
• Ten "Greater New York" Artists Most Likely to Succeed (As featured in)
• The Saatchi Gallery; About Matthew Day Jackson and his art Additional information on Matthew Day Jackson including artworks, text panels, articles, and full biography
• Bucky (ROYGBV), Proof I/V from Dymaxion Series Print at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• | Born in Dystopia exhibition | Rosenblum Collection | Paris, France | Permanent installation | "Second Home"

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Name	Jackson, Matthew Day
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Date of birth	1974
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