Lean-to

Matthew Day Jackson collages together elements from modern life to create monuments to our collective history that function as both lessons and omens. In his words, his work is “a response to a society that has not learned from its failures, or, seemingly, from its success.” Lean-to, conceived for The Blanton, belongs to a trilogy called Paradise Now! that is set in the wake of an imaginary nuclear war. In Jackson’s narrative, the human survivors must be dissuaded from repeating their disastrous missteps. Jackson draws on a wide variety of sources to make his esoteric and beguiling sculptures and installations, fusing icons from America’s past with references to art history. While working on Lean-to in residence at The Blanton, Jackson salvaged a wall from a local Habitat for Humanity site (2814 Glenview Road in Austin) and installed it over a unique set of legs: a pillar culled from his family's Nebraska homestead, a sculptural homage to European modernist Constantin Brâncusi, a cinderblock, and an upraised fist symbolizing Black Power. While much of Jackson’s early work charts the territory of societies gone awry, Lean-to, with its references to past utopian movements and beliefs, is, according to the artist, about “waiting for a new beginning.”