ART-PRESENTATION: Matthew Day Jackson-Still Life and the Reclining Nude
Matthew Day Jackson’s interdisciplinary practice explores a myriad of aspects of human experience and draws from sources that reveal both our intrinsic inventiveness and its counter-point, our ongoing capacity for destruction. He received his BFA at the University of Washington, Seattle in 1997, and his MFA at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick in 2001.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive
Matthew Day Jackson’s solo exhibition, “Still Life and the Reclining Nude” is on presentation at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in London. The exhibition features a new series of still life paintings and bronze sculptures. The series of still life paintings are direct representations of Jan Brueghel the Elder’s and Younger’s genre defining series of flower paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries, made during a time of Dutch colonial expansion and exploitation. Throughout Jackson’s oeuvre, process and materiality as a conduit for meaning has been a recurrent theme. The flower “paintings” are entirely composed of artificial and manufactured materials such as Formica, plywood and epoxy. These materials have a personal resonance for Jackson and are imbued with memories from his past and his own ‘American experience’. The use of these substances is a meditation on the domestic environment, aspiration, class and impermanence. In “Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase” (2017), Jackson encloses the delicate form of the screen-printed and in-laid flora within a poured lead surround. This metal has associations of poison or death and, in this manner, the artist signals a memento mori ingrained in the fabric of the work itself. The sculptures that feature in the exhibition have arisen from Jackson’s interest in, “how we assemble and constantly reformulate our identity through our own form”. Works such as “Untitled” (2017) are both a contemplation and critique of the tradition of the reclining figure, frequently nude and female, which came to define notions of beauty in the western canon. For Jackson, appropriation is a means of investigation and mining the past is a way of understanding how collective knowledge and received ideas come into being. In this exhibition, the works draw on his consideration of the odalisque as the ultimate eroticised representation of the body on display for a spectator.
Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 23 Savile Row, London, Duration: 1/3-28/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com
