Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance is a solo exhibition that includes works based on Jackson’s artist’s residency at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA. Jackson’s complex research, histories, and hagiographies are manifested in sculptures, constructed paintings, objects, books, and videos. In this exhibition, organized by Bill Arning, Director of the CAMH, Jackson continues his investigations into human consciousness and explores how positive evolutionary developments in human thought and culture occur under physical or mental stress. Other works explore how constructive and destructive technological developments often stem from a similar impetus: to expand human experience despite all odds, proving that progress is possible, whatever the risk. Drag racing, the Apollo space missions, test-pilot culture, the nuclear legacy in terms of both science and culture, commingle with iconic twentieth-century figures like visionary Buckminster Fuller, Big Daddy Don Garlits, Eleanor Roosevelt…even the artist’s mother. Jackson relates these modern myths using his iconic players as mischievous tricksters to question what it means to live at a time when technology has rewritten philosophy and religion.

Born in 1974 in Panorama City, CA, Matthew Day Jackson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Jackson’s solo exhibitions include Drawings from Tlön, Nicole Klagsbrun, New York, NY (2008); Terranaut, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY (2008); Diptych, Mario Diacono at Ars Libri, Boston, MA (2007); The Lower 48, Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York, NY (2007); Paradise Now!, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, OR (2006); and By No Means Necessary, The Locker Plant, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX (2004). Selected group exhibitions include Heartland, Vanabbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2008); Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Gallery, London, UK (2008); The Old, Weird America, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2008); and Greater New York, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY (2005).

Austin-based photographers Anna Krachey, Jessica Mallios, and Adam Schreiber are fascinated by the transformations that occur when the visible world passes through the camera’s lens. Capturing an image on film, they believe, is always an uncanny process because the photograph inevitably differs from what the artist perceived at the moment of its making. Using highly manipulable, large-format box cameras and a wide range of architectural, technological, and household subjects, they create images that acknowledge the mysterious slippages, distortions, and blendings of real and unreal inherent in photography. The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is pleased to present Perspectives 168: Anna Krachey, Jessica Mallios, and Adam Schreiber, the first museum exhibition for these artists.

Krachey, Mallios, and Schreiber—friends and colleagues who work independently but share interests and approaches—are aware that, because of the instantaneous nature of exposures and the architecture of cameras with origins in Renaissance camera obscuras, all photographs distort appearances as they record light reflected from three-dimensional objects on a flat surface. By employing unusual framing, extreme close-ups, and idiosyncratic points of view, the artists seek to remind us of the artificial, enigmatic nature of photographic images. “We’re more interested in how the medium of photography invents something than how it records something,” says Schreiber. Subtle disturbances of perception and cognition pervade the artists’ work. Likening their images to mirages, Krachey, Mallios, and Schreiber make photographs that evoke heightened or estranged versions of the visible world.

Anna Krachey concentrates on her domestic sphere, making images of oddball objects she purchases on eBay or finds in ignored corners of her house and neighborhood. Creating a homespun Surrealism, Krachey’s work is filled with arresting juxtapositions of places and things that suggest a personal hall of mirrors in which questions about intentionality and accident, play and seriousness, abound.

Jessica Mallios studies collisions of the natural and artificial. She records architectural junctures where simulations of natural forms meet mundane industrial surfaces, and where faux finishes designed to evoke emotional responses collide with cold functionalism. Mallios also stages tabletop experiments that poetically replicate many of the dynamics of the process of making photographic images.

Adam Schreiber draws much of his imagery and inspiration from the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, a library and museum dedicated to the humanities. There, he has photographed cultural artifacts ranging from the first known photograph taken in 1826 to a variety of other industrial and historical oddities.