NYAB Event - Matthew Conradt “New Noise”

Matthew Conradt “New Noise”

The Muriel Guépin Gallery

This event has ended.

Muriel Guépin Gallery presents “New Noise”- Matthew Conradt’s second solo show at the gallery.

Finding inspiration in his mid-western Rust Belt upbringing, Conradt has created a body of work that moves far beyond sepia-toned nostalgia. In his unique combination of collage and photo-transfer, he appropriates magazine and printed digital images to investigate the current disarray of the American Dream. The results are direct yet contradictory. Just as the flat, Mylar surface betrays the torn edges of the original collage, the realities of our country often don’t align with common perception. Decadent interiors, wood paneling from trailer homes and wide-open, desolate landscapes become portents and signifiers of the substantial socio-economic and cultural differences that currently exist in the United States. With collages that meld and blend into a dream-like state of America past and present, we see a transition of American culture from within eras and classes mashed up like a palimpsest of conflicted experiences.

Matthew Conradt’s recent work is interested in the underlying structures in images that reveal the different social realities that we are all apart of. Conradt appropriates images and alters them, interrupting the picture plane or obliterating the image entirely, making the narrative more difficult to penetrate. The result is paradoxically inviting and unnerving vignettes that call to mind the artifice of the imagery we encounter daily, creating an unsettling commentary about the various narratives that we consume.

Matthew Conradt received his Masters in Fine Art from Pratt Institute in 2008. Later that year Conradt was an Artist-In-Residence at the Cooper Union School of Art and was a part of the Artist-In-The-Marketplace Biennial at the Bronx Museum of Art in 2012. He was also featured as a solo presentation at Volta Art Fair in 2014. His work has been widely exhibited in the US and abroad and has been placed in significant US and European collections. He has been featured in numerous publications and art blogs such as the New York Times, SHK Magazine, and Little Paper Planes. Matthew currently lives and works in Brooklyn and is represented by the Muriel Guépin gallery.

This exhibition will be on view until March 29, 2015.