Matthew Day Jackson is an American artist whose multifaceted practice encompasses sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, video, performance and installation. Born in Panorama City, California, in 1974 and currently living and working on the East Coast, his art grapples with big ideas such as the evolution of human thought, the fatal attraction of the frontier and the faith that man places in technological advancement. In particular, his work addresses the myth of the American Dream, exploring the forces of creation, growth, transcendence, and death through visions of its failed utopia. Individual sculptures and paintings interconnect with each other to create complex scenarios that revisit history and reassemble its narratives. Frequently monumental, his work imposes not only on a large physical scale, but also conceptually, occupying an intellectual terrain that reaches from ancient history to outer space exploration and discovery. He utilizes a familiar iconography, recycling culturally loaded images such as the geodesic structures of Buckminster Fuller, mankind’s first steps on the moon, and the covers of LIFE magazine from the ‘60s and ‘70s, cross-pollinating these and mixing them with numerous references from art history. Jackson depicts these using the world around him: scorched wood, molten lead, mother-of-pearl, precious metals, formica, and found objects such as worn T-shirts, prosthetic limbs, axe handles and posters. These diverse materials resonate with symbolism, combining apocalyptic elements with the fruits of new technologies, historical imagery with contemporary ingredients. In his art, ideas are granted physical form, and it is in the clash between the two, in the material impact of idealist thought, that it derives its force. The critic Jeffrey Kastner has noted that his works locate ‘startling beauty in their counterintuitive material juxtapositions.’ However for Jackson, beauty is frequently partnered by desolation. His work explores a concept that he terms ‘the Horriful’; the belief that everything one does has the potential to bring both beauty and horror.