Matthew Day Jackson: ‘I want digital and analogue to fit together perfectly so we can regain our hands’
American artist-designer Matthew Day Jackson’s new show 'Against Nature' at Pace Gallery, New York offers a sharp digital spin on landscape painting
![Matthew Day Jackson, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (after Moran) , 2023](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/jHanxsFEgbip2jjPH8bD7W-415-80.jpg)
In his first exhibition with Pace Gallery in New York, the American artist-designer Matthew Day Jackson tackles a wide range of subjects, from the historic and scientific to the spiritual and fantastical. Titled ‘Against Nature’, the show sees Jackson expand his interest in finding similarities between binaries and dichotomies, particularly when it comes to the simultaneity of beauty and horror.
While his process is deeply rooted in research and experimentation, Jackson treats conceptual and physical anchors just as significantly. In ten new landscape paintings, Jackson brings together a seemingly disparate range of starting points, from the 1884 novel, Against Nature, by Joris-Karl Huysmans, which sees a French aristocrat leaving Paris for the countryside where he exploits natural resources to fuel his insatiable desire for luxury and beauty, to the motion-based and darkroom work of the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, Jackson has created a series of unearthly landscape scenes that feature distorted perspectives and uncanny colouration.
Matthew Day Jackson: ‘Against Nature’, 510 West 25th Street, New York, 12 May – 1 July 2023
Matthew Day Jackson, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (after Moran), 2023
In recounting where the creative process started, Jackson says, ‘I am fortunate enough to spend my summers and some of the winter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; I have loved the mountains since I was a kid. This innate love combined with WG Sebald, Rebecca Solnit, Thomas Cole, and a career-long interest in the imaging of the American West, [as well as] reading Huysman's novel and the pandemic NFT/digital art hiccup made me also consider my history of printmaking and fascination with methods of photomechanical reproduction in the late 19th century.’
To interrogate the complexities of authorship and intentionally challenge the mythology of artistic genius, Jackson developed a semi-autonomous laser process to bring an otherworldly quality to his paintings. ‘I developed a reductive painting process using my laser that works in conjunction with bitmap files taken from CMYK colour separations. These files are also tonal so they allow the laser to etch the image on both high and low relief,’ he reveals. ‘This has been a long time in the making. The end result does not present itself immediately, which I think makes it successful so that one is just confronted with the image rather than the complexity of the process.’
Matthew Day Jackson and David Tompkins, Footprint (1969), 2010
Jackson’s combination of physical and digital modes of making is at the forefront of the new works. ‘These always have had to work in concert with one another. I strangely think in reverse, relative to the industries that I traverse with my work,’ he says. ‘In design, I work from the physical until it feels and looks right and then transcribe it digitally to produce the prototype. When it comes to art, I just try to be as present as I can in my daily life and when form, colour, material, and process come together, the digital aspect becomes how to keep all of the things I am thinking about in registration. I want digital and analogue to fit together perfectly so that we can regain our hands, which have seemed to atrophy.’
It has notably been a decade since Jackson’s last solo exhibition in New York. ‘My show in 2013 was hard and I took on too much in youthful naivety, Jackson reflects. ‘In the time since, I went and lived in Wyoming, moved studios several times and finally the pandemic all piled up to take up ten years. I have been showing consistently outside the US but for a number of reasons, not in New York City. I am older and have more faith in tomorrow. I will never know it all, but I know some, and what I know is fun and exciting and that is good enough. Accepting this has taken ten years.’
Matthew Day Jackson: ‘Against Nature’, 510 West 25th Street, New York, 12 May – 1 July 2023
Matthew Day Jackson, 'Against Nature', until 1 July 2023, Pace Gallery, New York. pacegallery.com
Wallpaper* Newsletter + Free Download
For a free digital copy of August Wallpaper*, celebrating Creative America, sign up today to receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories
Pei-Ru Keh is a former US Editor at Wallpaper*. Born and raised in Singapore, she has been a New Yorker since 2013. Pei-Ru held various titles at Wallpaper* between 2007 and 2023. She reports on design, tech, art, architecture, fashion, beauty and lifestyle happenings in the United States, both in print and digitally. Pei-Ru took a key role in championing diversity and representation within Wallpaper's content pillars, actively seeking out stories that reflect a wide range of perspectives. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children, and is currently learning how to drive.
-
Postcard from Paris: Olympic fever takes over the streets
On the eve of the opening ceremony of Paris 2024, our correspondent shares her views from the streets of the capital about how the event is impacting the urban landscape.
By Minako Norimatsu Published
-
The Mercury Prize nominees for 2024 have been revealed
Charli XCX, The Last Dinner Party and Beth Gibbons are amongst this year's nominees
By Charlotte Gunn Published
-
Tour the Natural History Museum’s new gardens, a Jurassic lark in London
The Natural History Museum in London has unveiled two new gardens, with resident dinosaurs, after a transformation led by architects Feilden Fowles
By Bridget Downing Published
-
Nona Faustine confronts the past in New York
Artist Nona Faustine reframes New York's colonial past in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum
By Hannah Silver Published
-
Casa Bosques’ queer-themed book curation comes to New York’s East Village
In Pride Month 2024, Casa Bosques’ pop-up bookstore in The Standard hotel, East Village, offers a stylish haven for literary mavens
By Hannah Silver Published
-
‘Very few museums were interested in my work until recently’: Amalia Mesa-Bains on her first-ever retrospective
‘Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory’ is a long-overdue exhibition at El Museo del Barrio in New York celebrating five decades of the trailblazing Chicanx artist
By Sofia de la Cruz Published
-
Frieze New York 2024: what to see in and around the city
Frieze New York 2024 (until Sunday 5 May) sees the city’s ample spring season programming celebrated at The Shed
By Osman Can Yerebakan Published
-
Calling NYC grads! Sarabande Foundation invites you to an industry masterclass to pave way into the creative world
‘What Now?’ by Sarabande Foundation is a post-college guide to support graduates in making their next steps, with advice from the likes of Burberry, Thom Browne, and more
By Tianna Williams Published
-
‘I don't know what art is, but we have to make these things to understand ourselves’: Antony Gormley in New York
Wallpaper* meets Antony Gormley as his new exhibition, ‘Aerial’ opens at White Cube New York
By Hannah Silver Published
-
The New York art exhibitions to see in July
Read our pick of the best New York art exhibitions to see in July, from Jenny Holzer’s ‘Light Line’ at The Guggenheim to ‘Cosmography: an exploration of space and humanity’ at Templon
By Hannah Silver Last updated
-
Surreal, uncanny, seductive: step into Graham Little’s world
Scottish artist Graham Little presents his first US retrospective at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York
By Hannah Silver Published