ArtFocus 5 | Archive » Matthew Day Jackson

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Matthew Day Jackson // Pitfalls of Utopian Desire

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Matthew Day Jackson Born (1974) and lives in the US. Recent solo exhibitions: Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon (2006), Cubitt Artists, London (2006); recent group exhibitions: Rivington Arms Gallery, New York (2007), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2007), Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas (2007).

Matthew Day Jackson’s work combines anarchist, socialist and social-democratic ideas with the revolutionary spirit of Russian formalism and Constructivism and with modernist icons created by Mondrian, Brancusi or Beuys. His project involves reclaiming lost histories in order to provide alternative perspectives on American history, while enfolding them into a futureoriented narrative of his own. Pitfalls of Utopian Desire is a series of drawings featuring the pioneer wagon used by the artist while working on a sculpture for the 2006 Whitney Biennial. The rainbow below is taken from the December 1978 cover of TIME magazine, which covered the Jonestown massacre; it thus refers to the United States in the Nuclear age as a culture of death. In Beuys Suit (2007), the wooly felt serves a utopian reading, while the weaving points towards a Constructivist reading. The iconic combination of the felt suit and the rainbow spectrum integrates the values of the Civil Rights Movement into the legacy of environmental sculpture.