Matthew Day Jackson’s Harriet (Last Portrait) monumentalises the image of a black woman on a large oval panel. Working with the artisan techniques of wood-burning and precious stone inlaying, Jackson’s drawing alludes to both antique religious icons and the tradition of folk-craft. Coloured with aniline dye, a pigment used for staining fabric, and the collaged application of yarn, Jackson’s drawing conveys a stunning vivacity, offering a portrait of heroism that frames American cultural history with futuristic promise.

 

Using found materials, Matthew Day Jackson’s sculptures appropriate the cultural symbolism of everyday objects to reassemble visions of American identity. Hanging from the ceiling as primitive mobile, Hung, Drawn and Quartered II is an abject effigy of a lynching. Constructed primarily of a tree branch, Jackson draws upon a romantic heritage, converting his felled utopia into an animistic totem: adding boggle eyes, scythe handle legs, leather studded ‘stockings’, and dangling Birkenstock feet. Uniting references to colonial optimism, native mysticism, pioneering technology, socialism, and hippie fashion, Jackson executes a portrait of lost ideals.

 

Staging an uprooted tree trunk as trumpet, Matthew Day Jackson’s Alphorn With Quartered Stand poses as a figurative call for revolution. Harking back to an age of political innocence, Jackson adopts readymade natural form as an allegory of freedom; positioned beside a stump carved with an eagle insignia, the horn’s dead and varnished tendrils stand as monument and relic. Drawing reference to the American Transcendentalists and new world heroic folklore, Jackson’s sculpture resounds with a nostalgic patriotism reflective of contemporary discontents.

Appropriating the media of grass-roots protest, Matthew Day Jackson’s Dance of Destruction is a conglomeration of prints and photographs fly-posted on the gallery wall. Satirically heralding the greatness of America, Jackson places images out of context, rewriting his own ironic version of history. From the origins of a dynasty evidenced by George Washington’s face on the Sphynx, an antique advert boasting the bio-hazard construction of the White House, to a cavalier image of Ronald Reagan made up of his own conflicting words, Jackson revises a nation’s mythology, consolidating parody of current political issues with ‘how it might have been’.

Matthew Day Jackson’s Hungry Ghosts pictures the spirits of the American Civil War foraging for food; their barren field now lush parkland emblazoned with an environmental bumper sticker. Highlighting the discrepancy between the pioneering lore of America and the state of its current affairs, Jackson’s photograph conveys cultural critique, reuniting national allegiance with moral responsibility.