MATTHEW WEINSTEIN: 797.2 Sp. Spitz, Mark. F. Mar. The Splendid Outcast, 1987, 139p
Carolina Nitch Project Room, New York
Through January 18, 2014
Carolina Nitch Project Room, New York
Through January 18, 2014
Carolina Nitsch presents Matthew Weinstein’s second exhibition with the gallery entitled “797.2 Sp. Spitz, Mark. F. Mar. The Splendid Outcast, 1987, 139p.,” an installation of over printed, drawn, and painted library cards.
MATTHEW WEINSTEIN
Voyage of Vengeance, 2013
Courtesy Carolina Nitsch, New York
Matthew Weinstein’s catalog cards are configured as pairs and larger groups, arranged on an underlying grid which provides a structural network for the pieces. Weinstein will also be showing a unique artist’s book , “Giant a Screenplay,” in which a narrative, written by Weinstein, bassed on the 1956 movie “Giant,” weaves through a series of illustrated pages whose content and spectrum darken as the narrative transforms from movie description to obsessive personal narrative.The imagery in all these works is sometimes contained to individual cards, but often spills from one card to the next creating a complex tiled work. The overlaid images are iconographic figures and objects, such as fish and skeletons, common throughout much of Weinstein’s work.
Matthew Weinstein began acquiring piles of these cards from ebay. They arrived from different locations around the country, from different decades, and from different types of libraries specializing in different types of books. Hand annotated by librarians and smudged by generations of index fingers, they each carried their own history. Weinstein began randomly selecting them from different piles. Patterns, puns, jokes and coincidences occurred that spanned location, subject and time; a dada poetry emerged. Then he began to draw and print on them, using images from his own repertoire that have no direct relation to the subjects of the cards, and an abstract narrative emerged, one nudged along but never pushed.
As libraries have thrown away their card catalogues, we no longer search for information horizontally and sequentially. The internet search is guided by free association, random patterns of investigation and personalization. The internet is like a box of library file cards tossed on the ground; a sequence turns into a mound and the act of finding one piece of information causes us to associate it with whatever random bits of information come our way.
Matthew Weinstein’s work has always been based on the linking of different ideas and images that have no logical connections into narratives that almost make sense, but fall short of logical build ups of sequence in order to allow the subjectivity of the viewer to dominate his own experience of the work. The medium that Weinstein always floats his associations in is the intensity of the visual experience he delivers, and over the years he has utilized painting, animation, music, drawing and sculpture to achieve this. Looking is the way into this work, just as it is in abstraction, and it has always been Weinstein’s intention to find a place in art that can dissolve image, text and abstraction into one fluid.
Carolina Nitsch Project Room
534 West 22nd Street - New York, NY 10011
