Matthew Day Jackson Opens 'Something Ancient, Something New, Something Stolen, Something Blue' Exhibit Today

The first object visitors will encounter upon entering the exhibition is a car called the 'VICTA', a vehicle designed by Jackson's recently deceased uncle, Jim Nichols, and built by the artist's cousin Skip Nichols, a champion driver, builder, teacher, and head of Nichols Industries Racing in Tumwater WA. Built from the ground up, the car is redolent of family relationships and oral traditions. It looks like no other vehicle on the market. Propped high on mechanic's stilts over Mary Heilmann's permanent site- specific floor painting 'Highway', it is an artifact that hovers literally and figuratively apart from past and future design. Visitors passing beneath the 'VICTA' can examine its parts and history, contemplating the car as 'a sort of physical thesis' and a material expression of the exhibition's title. By relocating the hand-built 'VICTA' to the gallery's hushed space, Jackson transmutes its purpose from expected utility to unexpected meaning and offers a point of departure for the journey his exhibition suggests.

For three new major sculptures on view at 18th Street, Jackson has used basic and readily available optical programming technologies to produce full-scale recreations of objects instantly recognisable from the history of art. Jackson has said, 'We live in a remarkable time when every one of us can capture the world around us on a phone, and in a series of clicks remake the world. All of that power resides in the hands of the individual'.

Each of the three new sculptures on view were made in a process that began with photographs taken on a smartphone. Jackson downloaded his images onto a free and common app, then printed, carved and cast the three-dimensional iterations of his pictures, exploiting the primary means by which objects are born into our mediated world. The first of these sculptures, 'Scholar's Rock', replicates 'Scholar's Stone', an artifact that famously greets visitors at the entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA. Scholar's rocks have been admired by Chinese literati for centuries as objects of contemplation. Sculpted over time by the forces of nature, these ancient 'spirit stones' were considered by many to represent a distant, inaccessible paradise where immortals resided on high mountain peaks among clouds - a dream destination for humankind. Sculpting with the aid of a digital mesh model generated by a computer cloud and forming his artifact from compressed chemically identical lunar dust, Jackson mediates boundaries between reality and fiction. He has created a seemingly exact physical twin of 'Scholar's Stone' from imagery that exists only in the ether of digital space, captured with the artist's smartphone. Jackson notes that his sculpture has been produced using technology that potentially could fashion structures on the moon. Like a labyrinth whose end is known and is used as a meditative tool, the reproduction of the 'Scholar's Stone' is a meditation in materiality and of exploration and of our relationship to our natural environment. Continuing the theme of seeking a reflection of ourselves in the natural world, one of the main attributes of a scholar's stone is that it may behold anthropomorphic attributes, a subject Jackson has explored throughout his career.

Jackson collapses different temporal modes into other singular objects across the exhibition. Occupying the central gallery space at 18th Street, his second major new sculpture, 'Burghers of Calais', unites Auguste Rodin's landmark 1889 sculpture 'Les Bourgeois de Calais' with a full-scale 3-D model of a map that represents an area of the moon that hosted six manned lunar missions. This impression of the moon's surface is etched with latitude and longitude coordinates, suggesting a sense of time and place in a world beyond such earthbound standards.

Rodin's six heroic citizens stand upon Jackson's moonscape as if melting from the heat of the sun. Cast in bronze, the material of memorials, the burghers become stand-ins for astronauts, reminders of history and avatars of fated heroism. The piece considers the narrative structure of Rodin's original sculpture. Jackson explains that he was 're-casting Rodin's narrative as a way to tell the story of the forced march of the astronauts en route to the moon and to suggest the incredible loneliness these men felt back on earth after essentially cheating death in the process of exploration. The piece offers a way to consider the relics of the very best achievements of human ingenuity, which now lie eternally silent on the surface of the moon. There is more, always more'.