Matt Bollinger – Studio Visit – September 27th, 2011

Studio Visit: Matt Bollinger
Date: Tuesday, September 27th
Location: Zürcher Studio, Manhattan, NY
http://www.mattbollinger.com/

http://www.galeriezurcher.com/artists/bollinger/

Matt Bollinger

Image: Locker Room, 2011, collage, 60 x 48 in. (152,5 x 122 cm) - Image courtesy of Matt Bollinger & Zürcher Studio NY

Fence flashe and acrylic on cut and painted paper 58" x 72" 2011

The Party graphite on paper 30" x 22" 2011

Synopsis:

Our visit with Matt Bollinger took place at Zürcher Studio, the gallery where he mounted a solo exhibition about midnight Saturday. There were two sets of media represented in this show: medium to extra-large graphite drawings on paper and a series of works collaged from painted and torn paper.

The discussion started with a description of the largest piece in the show: a graphite drawing on a few huge pieces of paper with accompanying audio housed in an 8-track player and amp constructed out of brown chipboard with real 1970’s vintage head phones. Matt synopsized the audio recording, an interview in which his father describes in detail the events leading up to the near-fatal stabbing that took place the day before his 20th birthday decades ago. Growing up in the same neighborhood where the incident took place, this event became omni-present matter of family lore during Matt’s adolescence. In dark slate-velvet graphite Matt envisioned his father’s account of the event and rendered it as an un-peopled tableau. The details of the elder Bollinger’s descriptions make up the details of the drawing down to the make, model and interiors of the vehicles pictured. Listening to the audio while looking at the drawing seems to create a feedback loop of aural and visual information.

Matt’s collage paintings inhabit an emotional space somewhere between nostalgia and anxiety. Reference to the era of Matt’s adolescence is demarcated through the placement of objects and products specific to the early 1990’s. The group discussed whether these details nail the narrative to a specific generational experience or give surface detail to scenarios familiar to a viewers belonging to any cohort.

This body of work is a slight departure from Matt’s last large body of paintings, which were created through a process of narrative invention and removal constructed from original video source imagery that contains images of young adults. The current work is primarily a product of memory and invention that focuses on the violence and low-level menace inherent in many adolescent experiences. The group discussed the ways in which the making of the work relates to the context of the narrative. The anxious vibrations of color between the ripped, torn and cut paper add a visual weight to the narratives alluded to. The textured flatness and variation between areas of generalization and sensitive detail seem to invite a viewer experience that is like memory from another’s perspective.

– Amanda Lechner