MATT JOHNSON – WOOD SCULPTURE

The objects depicted in his new works are the casual detritus of art studios or building sites, whose forms are the result of usage and discarding. Crumpled cardboard boxes, shards of cut drywall, a discarded cup, pizza box, and rolls of blue painter’s tape are preserved in stasis, forms that would normally be realized only in the temporality between utility and refuse. These simple moments of dispossession become the generators of their own poiesis, as their incidental elegance is preserved through replication as sculpture. In a conceit to the transient fragility of sculpture proffered by artists like Fischli & Weiss, a certain lack of the essential qualities that confer existence upon an object is imbued in Johnson’s forms. This impermanent nature is borne out by the sculptural constructions themselves, as their wooden armatures form the supports for objects that you would usually expect to see crumble in front of you.

Johnson’s approach to display lends the exhibition a scientific quality, as objects are arranged in constellations that seem to hint at a gravitational attraction created by their masses and the spaces between them. Long concerned with creating rifts in the negotiation between expectation and reality, Johnson’s sculptures are arranged to communicate with each other, and seem to morph according to their imposed relations. The rubble of production, artistic, commercial and otherwise, is used to create a new type of codification, one in which objects between states and materials in flux become their own profligate and surreptitious communicators. An incorporeal form of predicate dualism begins to take hold, wherein an object can be both itself and signify a potential beyond both form and function.

Opposite – Untitled (4 Stacked Tape Rolls), 2016

Exhibition runs through to February 25th, 2017

303 Gallery
555 W 21 Street
NY 10011

www.303gallery.com