August 6, 1945

‘Consider August 6, 1945 (2010): the title of this enormous wall-piece gives the date that the US dropped the ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb on Hiroshima, but the image rendered in charred wood is a topographic view of Hamburg, which underwent a bombing campaign in 1943 that has been described as ‘the Hiroshima of Germany’. With a sleight of hand and a nudge from history, Jackson sacrifices time and space at the altar of signification. His loaded date, potent map and vivid detail spin their own story; one that supplements the past as it elides it, using the power of time, language and association to build a space that speaks of both bombings but exits somewhere else entirely’ (G.T. Beck, ‘Matthew Day Jackson’, in frieze, no. 135, November-December 2010).