Matthew Day Jackson (born 1974) is an American artist whose multifaceted practice encompasses sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, video, performance and installation.
Jackson's works utilize a familiar iconography - images such as the geodesic structures of Buckminster Fuller, mankind's first steps on the moon, and the covers of Life magazine from the 1960s and 1970s - and references from art history.
Materials he employs have included scorched wood, molten lead, mother-of-pearl, precious metals, formica, and found objects such as worn T-shirts, prosthetic limbs, axe handles and posters.
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.
[citation needed] In one such work, titled Little Bouquet in Clay Jar (2018), the artist incorporates an aerial view of the Trinity test site, explaining that 'the job of the apocalypse or the reckoning is the job of a god or deity, but in the 20th century, it became a human possibility.