Installation view, ‘Matthew Day Jackson. Something Ancient, Something New, Something Stolen, Something Blue’, Hauser & Wirth New York, 18th Street, 2013 © Matthew Day Jackson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Genevieve Hanson
08 Nov 2017
Alexander Shulan
The Brooklyn Rail
Oct 2013

Matthew Day Jackson at Hauser & Wirth reviewed by The Brooklyn Rail

08 Nov 2017
Alexander Shulan
The Brooklyn Rail
Oct 2013

With his new exhibition Something Ancient, Something New, Something Stolen, Something Blue, Matthew Day Jackson unfurls a nightmarish and mythological American landscape reminiscent of the sort described in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road;

 bodies are stolen from some perverse, long-shuttered, anatomical museum and presented in immaculate glass cases. Just outside, there stands an empty and irradiated wasteland. His first solo New York show in three years, the exhibition picks up on themes from earlier work: man-made inventions rife with motifs of existential inquiryrockets, drag-racing, nuclear weaponry, and new technical innovations in physiologyall interpreted through the retrospective lens of art history.
The exhibition brings to mind Percy Bysshe Shelleys poem Ozymandias,which describes the inscription on the base of a statue that refers to the former grandeur of a now-destroyed landscape. The 1818 poem speaks to arts impermanence. Something Ancient is well suited to such an insighta series of sculptures and paintings that are, in part, the fearful products of destructive technologies.
Upon climbing Hauser & Wirths massive entryway and entering the museum-sized gallery, the first object encountered is a black racing car suspended over the entrance. Looking up at the guts of Victa(2013), constructed by Jacksons cousin from a design by the artists late uncle Skip Nichols, a professional racecar driver, the piece exudes a menacing and destructive aura, the car a metaphor for some latent connection between physical speed and the artists own mortality.
A stand-alone room, constructed out of the drywall and siding you might find in a Southwestern home, features a series of anatomical portraits of the human body in standing mirrored vitrines. The traveling freak-show,BODIESThe Exhibition (explicitly referenced in the release), is a clear rejoinder. Each portrait presents a different level of observation of the body. Titled Veins(2013), Nerves(2013), Muscles(2013), and Skeleton(2013), the encased sculptures are variably cast in bronze, silicone, and wood. These bring to mind the hyper-realistic, uncanny silicone sculptures of Paweł Althamer, and the finale of Peter Greenaways film A Zed and Two Noughts, where a pair of identical twins records the decay of their own bodies.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Jacksons version of Rodins The Burghers of Calais(1889). Titled Magnificent Desolation(2013) and rendered from collaged images of the sculpture taken on a smartphone, it re-presents the figures, with their features worn down, on top of a lunar landscape that looks like a Google Map of the moon. The sculptures physical decay, literally caused by the low resolution of its source photos, finds an analogue in the erosion that might be caused by nuclear disaster or the heat of the sun. Ozymandiass creations, indeed.
In the next room, Jackson presents a series of massive wall-paintings set in steel frames: a group of topographical renderings of the surface of the moon, and birds-eye-views of two cities. Enshrouded Paris(2013), shows Paris set in International Klein Blue. That color, which Yves Klein patented in 1960, a fusion between the color palettes of the earth and sky, becomes the cerulean haze of a nuclear blast viewed from a few hundred miles away. August 6, 1945(2013), presents San Francisco rendered in charred wood, explicitly referencing (in title and composition) the landscape of Hiroshima. Together, they draw a none too subtle connection between the American drive for space exploration and the destructive results of the development of nuclear technology. Farside(2013), presents the tidally locked far side of the moon, another clear metaphor for a landscape marked by the effects of nuclear fallout.
It is said that Shelley was inspired to write Ozymandiasafter the strange experience of seeing a broken statue of Ramesses II that had ended up in the British Museum. Jacksons touch is a great deal heavier than Shelleys. Walking through his exhibition, one cant help but wonder about the ultimate fate of these objects, and of the larger world they might come to inhabit.

Be the first to know updates about Hauser & Wirth
Thanks for signing up. You must confirm your email address before we can send you. Please check your email and follow the instructions.
*By submitting your email address, you consent to receive our Newsletter. Your consent is revocable at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in our Newsletter. The Newsletter is sent in accordance with our Privacy Policy and to advertise products and services of Hauser & Wirth Ltd. and its affiliated companies.
×
×
×
×