Matthew Day Jackson — Yesterday’s Tomorrow

A steel frame stands open in the gallery, outlining three rooms of a home. Brooklyn-based artist Matthew Day Jackson built everything inside them: paintings, furniture, and sculpture made from Formica, laminate, and molded plywood, joined by ceramics from Laura Seymour, his partner. These are the materials that filled American kitchens after World War II, sold as clean, modern, and made to last. A home dressed in them was a piece of tomorrow a family could own. Jackson takes that promise as his subject and its surfaces as his medium.

Jackson works across painting, sculpture, furniture design, photography, video, and installation, and every painting here is built rather than brushed. He traces an image by hand, cuts its shapes from Formica, and fills them with oil paint and poured lead, so a countertop laminate becomes the picture itself. His furniture travels the opposite way, taken apart from mid-century originals and rebuilt as designs of his own.

The confidence that put Formica on the counter also put a man on the Moon. Jackson recreates the images of that era’s ambition, LIFE magazine, the Apollo landing, the American frontier, in the materials of the home, so the ambition that reached the Moon shares a room with the ambition that bought a new kitchen.

Yesterday’s Tomorrow holds that promise, now more than half a century old, in the present tense. Its objects, built from a future first pictured in postwar America, stand in one open frame where time runs in both directions. Together they measure how close we came to the future earlier generations imagined, and how much of it we are still building.

Yesterday’s Tomorrow is presented by the Emory Family with major support from the Hilliard Exhibition Fund.