Matt Connolly “Stamps”
Essex Flowers
This event has ended.
This exhibition, Matt Connolly’s first solo presentation in New York, comprises two new large format paintings, a large ink drawing with collage, and a spatial intervention in the basement gallery at Essex Flowers. The paintings, Stamps 1 and 3 begin with hand-built, steel-reinforced MDF panels to which layer after layer of acrylic paint in an array of colors and tones are applied with a roller, and later sanded down. Impressions made with a hammer and nail dipped in paint at intervals create an interference pattern, a manual moiré. Spidery disruptions in the works’ surfaces are the result of rogue feathers cast off from the feather factory situated directly below the artist’s studio in Westlake, Los Angeles. The result is a dense, textured palimpsest: haptic and optic, markedly flat while evocative of depth, and visually unstable, varying with any given vantage. Pattern is similarly defined and dissolved in the ink drawing, Stamps 2, within its own expanse and the elements of an off-register collage. An irregular wall of the gallery has been selected and coated with a textured pale yellow paint for the run of the exhibition. Stamp is of course both a noun and a verb. In this context it is a physical action and a temporal index, a tool and its effects, a mark and its impact, to impress and an impression.
Media
Schedule
from November 21, 2014 to January 04, 2015
Opening Reception on 2014-11-21 from 18:00 to 20:00