Chason Matthams
Advances, None MiraculousAugust 11 - September 13, 2015
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Thierry-Goldberg Gallery is
pleased to present Advances, None Miraculous, the first New York solo exhibition of Chason Matthams. The
show will be up from August 11th until September 13th with a closing
reception on Wednesday, September 9th from 6 to 8pm.
Matthams constructs
non-linear narratives by appropriating and making references to numerous art
historical and pop culture imagery, mostly found online, where there is no
hierarchy between styles, ways of rendering, time periods, or whether the
authors are classified as artist, illustrator, designer, or otherwise.
One way to look at this
series of paintings, Matthams says
about his work, is as a mind going into anxious overdrive trying to
construct a narrative out of all the disparate information and random
juxtapositions one is confronted with daily. I can't help but think of the fractured progression of my
paintings as the way I experience life itself, open and almost chaotic in the
moment but falling into a narrative over time. I was first taken with this way
of thinking through the television writer David Milch, on his audio commentary
for his HBO show "John from Cincinnati" (2007),
We live with fragmented sensibilities. Moment to moment our stream of
consciousness is so constantly modified by whatever waves of experience come
over it from the outside. We sustain the illusion of a continuing coherent
sensibility. We are in a modulated flux between the input of the outside and
which of our senses we are using to assign meaning to that input, and under
those circumstances the idea of having a coherent story, that need to embrace
that illusion, is just one of the arbitrary ways we kid ourselves that things
make sense.
Pragmatism is at the basis of
the work, Matthams
continues, I honestly don’t know if I am considering this right now
because David Milch is an admirer of the American philosopher and psychologist
William James or because this summer Pixar’s “Inside Out” affected me more than
anything else. The movie illustrated the abstract thought section of the brain
as a potentially hazardous zone, a place where the characters lose sight of who
they are and how they function in day-to-day life. They start interacting with
each other and the world not through emotional truths but through ideas and concepts
that then become so abstracted it’s impossible for them to function in reality.
Chason Matthams (b. 1981,
Miami, FL) currently lives and works in New York, NY. He holds an MFA and a BFA
from New York University. Matthams has previously exhibited at Tyler Wood
Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 80WSE Gallery, New York, NY; Interstate Projects,
Brooklyn, NY; Launch F18, New York, NY; and at Frédéric de Goldschmidt,
Brussels, Belgium.