Hayden, Reference Galleries
Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance
May 8 - July 12, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 7, 5:30-7:30 PM
Artist Talk: Saturday, May 9, 2 PM, Bartos Theatre
A conversation with Matt Jackson and MIT Professor David A. Mindell, author of Digital Apollo, MIT Press - Moderated by curator Bill Arning
In May of 2009 the MIT List Visual Arts Center will present Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance, a solo exhibition of works based on Jackson’s research as an artist-in-residence at MIT. Jackson’s complex research, histories, and hagiographies are manifested in sculptures, constructed paintings, unmanipulated objects, books, and, videos. In this exhibition, Jackson continues his investigations into human consciousness and explores how positive evolutionary developments in human thought and culture occur under extreme physical or mental stress.
Jackson's Study Collection is an enormous stainless steel shelf-unit (inspired by the artist’s visits to the technological artifacts in MIT Museum's basement storeroom). It will include a small-scale rocket model as well as models of all of the missile systems from V1, V2, Fat Man, Little Boy, Thor, Titan, Cruise missiles, and other thought-artifacts created in the artist's studio. Study Collection will also include another series of models that show the artist's skull morphing into the skull of Phineas Gage, an unfortunate railway-worker whose actual skull is in Harvard's Warren Medical Museum. Study Collection features a 3-D digital scan of a 3-foot damping rod that shot through Gage's skull making him a living oddity and example of the mind/body split.
The exhibition will be presented during MIT's celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, scheduled for June 11 and 12, 2009. The surviving astronauts from Apollo 11 will convene at MIT for a public forum, at a time when the crucial symbolic function of manned space travel has reemerged in national politics. A collaborator on the project is David A. Mindell from MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society whose 2008 MIT Press book Digital Apollo discusses how the technology for the mission was written to give the human astronauts a function as pilots-rather than as redundant passengers or as they derogatorily referred to the role they were assigned, "spam in a can."
Jackson grapples with such big themes as technology, nature, and God, finding inspirational figures and combining them in a dream-team think tank of the living and dead. These include such figures as R. Buckminster Fuller and Eleanor Roosevelt, (a small scale version of Jackson's portrait of Fuller will hang in the exhibition as a type of ancestor portrait in recognition of his years at MIT.)
Jackson proudly promotes redemptive strategies and demonstrates a resurgent belief that such a worldview pushed forward by artists might actually save us. A self-proclaimed feminist, he invited his Wiccan mother to deliver a blessing on video for his first solo gallery project in New York and says that he feels part of his job as an artist in to make up for the harm his gender has done to the world.
About the Artist
Matthew Day Jackson, 33, first grabbed art world attention with his entry in the 2005 Greater New York exhibition at P.S.1 in New York City. His work, Sepulcher (2004) took the form of a Viking burial ship with sails made from the artist's old punk rock T-shirts stitched into a something like a giant, roughly made painting by Mondrian. For the 2005 Whitney Biennial of American Art, Jackson contributed Chariot, The Day After the End of Days (2005-2006), a pioneer covered wagon floating above a bed of fluorescent tubes.
