White Cube Hoxton Sq
26 March-1 May 2010
London
N1

‘The point of departure for my paintings is an emotional quality or a factuality – in other words, something I can feel.’(EH)

The major work in the exhibition is ‘Gast 1-9′ (‘Guest’), a monumental nine-canvas series of a single tree. Havekost photographed the tree at night, illuminating the tree in a quick flash before moving to a different perspective and shooting again. The resulting atmosphere is spooky and surreal: the trees sway and droop, the greens hang like thick ooze from the pendulous branches. The tree is, of course, one of the oldest motifs in Western art: with ‘Gast’, the artist has created a proliferating forest that seems to haunt this rich history, a gang of spectres that persist in provoking awe and wonder.(White Cube)

What a serene space to walk into: being as I was in the middle of a slightly frantic day….or at least a day that had set my nerves on edge, like constantly feeling that I had left an important package on the train. All of that stopped when I walked into White cube that day…..

Calm: these paintings- ‘Guest’- are like walking through a forest at dusk, perhaps there’s snow on the way. But its the memory I am experiencing when I looked at these paintings. I wasn’t transported to the outside space but instead to the space that my imagination conjured, convincing me that I had indeed experienced it. Romantic visions no doubt, but the quality of layered paint onto a hessian coloured canvas, which in itself seemed as fragile as the memory painted onto them, took me there and I had no control over it.

Upstairs: Blur my memory and make them happier, give them the colours of faded 1970s polaroids and let me see partial faces and gatherings of people I never knew…. they fade away as the canvases turn to a murky grey static and I am pulled back to the white space I am actually in.

I feel better, I make my way home. Eventually.

Riflemaker
2 March – 24 April 2010
London W1

Anderson considers time, or more particularly the way that time shapes itself, to be her most significant working material. For her, memories can be described as reconstructions, often distorted to the extent that each becomes a creation or fiction itself. She views memory as the ‘master of fiction’, whereby the passage of time may lead to a remembrance being more akin to fiction than fact. (Riflemaker)

Impossible red hair weaves through the interior of this untouched building: It enters through the fireplace, winding its way through the buildings guts and emerges upstairs before making its way out of the window…this endless loop of a fairy tail.

I feel all at once dwarfed by the hair, there is perhaps a maze in there..or a treasure I cant quite get to, objects that have been overgrown and trapped by this Rapunzel hair. And I feel sure that I am in a nightmare and not a child’s bed time story. So it must be unsettling since many of those, on reflection, are disturbing enough.

Up stairs the theme continues in miniature. The pale, red haired girl is trapped in the black teeth of a high tower, or wrapped in her own hair, some of the very small figures are set within the ever decreasing circles of white forms reminding me of a foetus, disturbing in its execution and presented to us as ancient relics in glass cylinders or perhaps old glass towers.

Here is a distortion of memory tottering on the edge of autobiography, until the film ‘The Night I Became A Doll’- in the this case in the depths of the gallery accessed by rickety stairs -solidifies the possibility that true cruelty has taken place, some unspoken dissatisfaction that a mother can feel towards a daughter and vice versa. What looms here is the fear of discovering our disappointment with each other and then inevitably ourselves.

The Night I Became A Doll
9 Minute Video 16/9 ©2009

I came away feeling that I had experienced a living breathing entity.
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I also got trapped in the hair on my way out.
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photographic out takes HERE

This post was prompted by the new video work posted on Matthew Stone: Optimism As Cultural Rebellion and also the latest post indicating a new exhibition in Denmark ‘Body Language’

Emerging from a strongly collaborative South London squat-scene of young artists,actors, writers, musicians, moviemakers and designers, Stone produces chiaroscuro laden photography, dramatically portraying friends and night-time players stripped of context-locating clothing, draped in cheap fabric swatches, and locked in self-absorbed states of romanticised visionary ecstasy. His photographic images assert a deadpan observational tone, whilst simultaneously proposing a heightened version of what is already present: taking a step back to revel in the dynamic, the construction of a particular image, and the amplification of the inherent mythologies underpinning his subjects.(Union gallery via Fieldgate)

Optimism as cultural rebellion, 2005.

The tension of dark and light, weakness and strength, the spontaneous and meticulously planned. These are the opposites that draw me to Stones work. The (fleshier) classical bodies in constructed rituals that come alive in video work and photographic stills that conjure a Utopian co-existence with a balancing hint of the sinister as the players push and pull at each other.

I havnt seen nearly as much of Matthew Stones work as I would like, much of my viewing has been via the web with an impressive piece at the JT Project. I have mentioned stone’s blog before: Updated with new work or curious finds: I love it…. Matthew Stone: Optimism As Cultural Rebellion

New Exhibition:

V1 Gallery

BODY LANGUAGE is the new exhibition by Matthew Stone at V1 Gallery (Denmark). The solo show will include new photography, sculpture and collage.

Matthew Stone’s (b. 1982) human landscapes are monumental and simple, strong and fragile. His mounds of naked bodies are presented as multidimensional beings full of life.

The pivotal questions are of separation and return, of challenges to perceptions of individuality. Separated bodies physically return; placed together to undergo a romantic mutation that enables a metaphysical reconnection. Stone uses the interplay of light and darkness to follow sculptural curves and surfaces, awakening the imagination’s desire to delve into the (c)overt.

It is this polarisation that creates the fields of tension in all of Stone’s works. Our surroundings and ourselves often seem divided into irreconcilable binaries: right/wrong, light/dark, good/evil, I/other. Rather than rejecting these overly simplistic, seeming contradictions, Stone proposes new contexts for their powerful co-existence.

In his performative rituals and collectively-minded shoots the camera becomes a shamanic tool used to invoke and create history, rather than to document it. With art as his weapon of choice Matthew challenges fear and denudes a newly defined optimism that not only sheds light on man, but also on the endless possibilities we are all composed of.

Matthew Stone was recently named the most influential living British artist under 30 by The Sunday Times and Norman Rosenthal, curator and critic, has draw comparison to the energy of a young Hirst. This is Matthew Stone’s first solo exhibition in Denmark. (Matthew Stone: Optimism As Cultural Rebellion)

Matthew Stone: MYSPACE

“Optimism is the Vital Force that Entangles itself with and then Shapes the Future.” Stone’s work revolves specifically around creative interactions and community, based on the idea that individual autonomy can be successfully combined with the power of collectivity.

|noōn| lullabies: a time between wakefulness and sleep
(working title)