Jackson Exhibit Probes Human Consciousness
October 16, 2009
First things first: Artist Matthew Day Jackson and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Director Bill Arning are not related.
“Whenever we give talks together, I usually have to explain that, despite our matching beards, we are not, in fact, brothers,” Arning quipped.
Still, over the course of working on Jackson's traveling exhibition The Immeasurable Distance — Arning's curatorial debut at CAMH — they've gotten to know each other well enough that their talks take on a siblinglike rhythm. Jackson, the younger, intense, slightly brooding artist, tends to veer off on tangents that spawn tangents of their own in midsentence. The sociable, sunny Arning cheerfully steps in to rein in Jackson's conversational sprawl and bring his vision into focus for the perhaps-overwhelmed listener. Jackson — and the listener — breathe a grateful sigh.
Playing back our conversation, recorded while Jackson was in the middle of installing the show in CAMH's sprawling upstairs gallery, I wasn't always sure where I was in one of his sentences. That's understandable. Installation fatigue aside, Jackson's work deals with some of life's hardest-to-digest issues: human consciousness, evolution, the double-edged nature of cultural and scientific breakthroughs — and let's not forget drag racing. You try summing that stuff up in sound bites.
To start with drag racing, Chariot II — I Like America and America Likes Me (2008), is Jackson's re-creation of a crashed car frame he rescued from the front lawn of his cousin, race-car driver Skip Nichols. Jackson's version is made of wool felt — “impregnated” with epoxy — and seems to float on a spectrum of electronic lights, which are solar powered. The windshield is made of stained-glass windows — the kind “that survive in bombed-out cathedrals,” Seattle critic Jen Graves wrote when the work was shown at the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery in 2008.
“(I was) thinking about the race car as a sort of church — a place to practice your faith,” said Jackson, who has gone to drag-racing school and plans to start a drag-racing team as part of a future project. “In order to drive a race car, you have to be fearless, to a certain degree, because to operate with any sort of fear is actually dangerous — dangerous to the other racers, dangerous to you. But then, in order to race, to drive the machine to its fullest capacity — I like that expression, too, in relationship to faith in the machine — (you have) to push it almost to failure.”
The piece's solar-power component has gotten an upgrade since Jackson did an artist's residency at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology List Visual Arts Center, where Arning was a curator prior to joining CAMH in April, and where the show originated. Jackson teamed with MIT's Energy Initiative to light Chariot II with state-of-the-art solar panels, and the piece will come with labels discussing the initiative's achievements and potential.
Most of the remaining work in The Immeasurable Distance emerged from Jackson's residency, where he had access to, and drew inspiration from, MIT archives and scientists, including David A. Mindell, director of MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society and author of Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight.
Mindell hit on the common ground between science and art in a white paper he co-wrote for the White House outlining reasons to resume manned space travel, Arning said.
“(Mindell) says there's a fundamental need to expand the parameters of human experience,” Arning said. “That's where art, the space program and the early nuclear physicists who developed the technology that became the bomb — all of that comes together with this fundamental need to expand the parameters of human experience.”
Jackson nodded.
“That's why we're all here, I hope,” he said.
