Matthew Day Jackson — Yesterday’s Tomorrow

A steel frame stands open in the gallery, drawing three rooms in outline. Artist Matthew Day Jackson built everything inside them, paintings, furniture, and sculpture made from Formica, laminate, and molded plywood, the materials that filled American kitchens after World War II. Those surfaces were sold as clean, modern, and built to last, and a home dressed in them was a piece of tomorrow you could own. That promise is Jackson’s subject, and its surfaces are his medium.

His method runs in both directions. Every painting is traced by hand, cut from Formica, and filled with oil paint and poured lead, so the surface that promised permanence becomes the image itself. The design objects often travel the opposite way, broken down from their mid-century originals and rebuilt into something new. A painting is also an architectural fragment, an artifact refusing to sit in one category.

Inside the open frame, these objects read as the contents of a home, joined by ceramics from Laura Seymour, his partner. What a home holds is rarely only furniture, and these rooms carry memory, aspiration, and belief, the ideals that shape how we picture the future.

That picture extended past the front door. The postwar optimism that sold a better life through modern design also drove America to the Moon, and Jackson works with the imagery that carried it: LIFE magazine, the Apollo landing, the frontier. In his hands, these familiar images become artifacts that read as historical and futuristic at once, a measure of how close we came to the future they promised.

Yesterday’s Tomorrow proposes that history moves less as a straight line than a cycle of recurring ambitions and reinventions, asking what values those visions carry forward and what homes, both literal and cultural, we leave to those who follow.