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October Crit + Review

Here’s what I showed at my crit last Friday. I’ve been producing a lot of work so I chose to curate a solo exhibition from the work I’ve made in September and October.

On The Eighth Day The Lord Made Schmear. Bread and Nails.
Gender Monsters. Oil Stick on Canvas.
My Mom and Her Favourite Child. Digital Photographs.
The Real Me. Digital Photograph and Photoshop.

It’s no secret that I’ve been focusing on exploring new media in grad school. But how could I show my scattered work while maintaining a recognizable identity and strong point of view? That was the central question I asked while curating work for this show. Could a collection of work like this, however divided across media boundaries, represent my singular expression of self?

Of course, humour is a thread that runs through most of my work. I’ve been telling this ongoing joke through the deliberately low craft of my work: we expect to see “high art” in a white cube gallery space, and I subvert that by showing low brow work in these spaces. The way I see it, high art and low craft exist on a kind of continuum that all art can be placed on.

Great. That’s some Art 101 Intro to White Men shit. I’m interested in investigating the phenomenon of work that is so far left on the spectrum that it’s considered good art. There’s some kind of agreed upon (not between everyone, but between enough people) level of low craft that for some reason gets called things like “free” and “uninhibited” instead of “heaping piles of garbage.” It’s how high end galleries get filled with pop art of Daffy Duck shitting out money. So what is that? How can I reproduce it? More importantly: does this mean that the spectrum is not a spectrum at all? Perhaps it’s more of a circle, where good art and bad art meet ends and are in essence the same thing.

I chose only diptychs for this show, attributing an underlying binary system to the collection’s internal logic. In my mind this mirrors the intrinsic logic of good/bad art that we so desperately want to place onto any kind of artwork. It’s so much easier to categorize a work than to have to actually engage with it.

Yet, the pairs tend to trouble the idea of good binaries. A piece of white bread and a bagel are probably more similar than they are different. At the end of the day, they are really the same thing — in the same way that me posing for a headshot and my photoshopped alien-acid-trip head represent IRL/abstract digital realities but are both just images of myself. I’ve created a series of fake binaries with these works, questioning the good/bad art divide.

So is our world really so rigid that we can continue to rely on the binaries we socially construct? Moving forward, can we use the same systems of categorization to tackle ongoing global issues? I don’t know man, I just nail bagels into walls.

Some things that I’m eager to explore looking forward are: what else is so bad it’s good (reality tv, children’s paintings or childlike art, and junk food come to mind); how does the binary code that our current technology is based on bleed into our non-tech lives; and, more logistically driven, how can I make work like this appear as a legitimate commodity to art consumers?

Thanks for looking at these words with your eyeballs. Matty out.

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