August 6, 1945,

2010

Adept at making even the most banal materials speak forcefully and poetically, Matthew Day Jackson explores subjects as varied as history, science, landscape, and belief. Nearly all of these issues are addressed in <em>August 6th, 1945</em>, one of a series of eponymous works begun while the artist was in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using only wood, lead, and a blowtorch, Jackson here re-creates a bird’s-eye view of Dresden, Germany, circa February 15, 1945, shortly after the city was engulfed in bombs and flames, the result of a campaign carried out by British and American forces. Associated with astronauts, cartographers, and surveillance satellites, the aerial perspective employed by Jackson speaks to the power that vision and knowledge engender; it also places viewers inside the planes that flew over Dresden and alongside Paul Tibbets, the pilot who captained the <em>Enola Gay</em> to Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. Like many of Jackson’s works, the assemblage seen here addresses the weaponization of technology as well as the contradictory fruits of human progress. As the philosopher Walter Benjamin famously wrote in 1940, "There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism."