Matthew Day Jackson

The American dream is deeply rooted
in the nineteenth century, when everyone in the New World enjoyed equal opportunities, the assurance of instant wealth, as long as you really did work
hard. The dream was so powerful that
the rest of the world could join in too. Over the past century the persuasive power of this dream has occasionally gotten out of hand and spilled over into violence. Matthew Day Jackson confronts Utopia failing
in a visual way. He chooses culturally
loaded images, like a cover of Life magazine of 1962
showing a mass shelter, and reproduces it in
scorched wood. Jackson takes the viewer on a journey through a world in which the past and the present merge. As a genuine snapshot of the fear and obsession with mass shelters during the Cold War, it
depicts life in that era like nothing
else. It reflects a reality that was overwhelming at the time and has now been restaged, using highly improbable
materials. Utopia healed and transformed
into art. A new history in which facts cannot be distinguished from fiction and the American dream is reborn with irony.