Christy Matson: The Sun Doesn't Show Through the Mist Until Noon
April 28 - June 17, 2012
Alderman Exhibitions is pleased to present The Sun Doesn’t Show through the Mist until Noon, an exhibition of weavings by Christy Matson. This will be the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.
In this new body of work, Christy Matson activates rhythmic sequences that simultaneously reference an early modernist aesthetic and the preceding ethnographic patterns by which many twentieth-century painters and sculptors were influenced.
The culmination of a process of translation from sketches in marker to full-scale weavings in cotton, linen, cashmere, and tencel, the fields of color within the woven patterns retain the marks of the artist’s hand as it telegraphs through the work of the shuttle. The reinsertion of the casualness of the sketches into the weavings highlights the importance of the idiosyncrasies in Matson’s process and use of color. The breaks or glitches in the self-inscribed systems destabilize the grid and underscore the tension between necessity and monotony in the structure of a plan.
The Sun Doesn’t Show through the Mist until Noon is organized around an intimately scaled series of framed weavings, four larger works on a black, and a collaborative video project produced with Ken Fandell. Regulated, yet lively, the areas of pattern in the series float within a white, woven ground. Faint feathering around the edges suggests a continuation of the pattern below the picture plane, an effect that serves as a reminder of depth and invites interpretation through each work’s concurrent existence as both surface and object. Although they are constructed using a similar process, the larger works are stitched onto a Belgian linen ground on stretched canvas, a method of presentation that stresses the physicality of the works while initiating a conversation about materiality that trespasses over a more painterly history of abstraction. The video, a psychedelic collage of brightly colored segments from the drawings that inspired the weavings interspersed with footage of turtles filmed in El Salvador, speaks to faith in the relationship between persistence and intuition, exemplified by the work of the hand as it is bound up in the work of the loom. A two-part publication will accompany the exhibition. The initial text will contain documentation of the body of work as a whole and act as a guide for navigating the works in the gallery. A later, more comprehensive volume will follow with exhibition-specific documentation and reflection from participants on the ideas and discourses that emerged over the course of the show.
Christy Matson (b. 1979, Seattle, WA) a left-coast transplant to the Midwest, is an artist and educator at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the department of Fiber and Material Studies. She received her B.F.A in Studio Art from the University of Washington in 2001 and her M.F.A. in Textiles from CCA in 2005. Recent exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Arts Houston, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The Knoxville Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR, and The San Francisco Museum of Craft+Design. In 2011, Matson was an artist in residence at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR and in 2006, she was an artist in residence at the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts in New York City. Her work is in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of Ameican Art’s Renwick Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland, OR.
Ken Fandell is a Chicago-based artist. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and The US Embassy in Bulgaria. He shows with Tony Wight Gallery.
