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Matthew Farrell's relief sculptures and paintings explore tensions and contradictions around ideas including home, safety, property, work, and empathy. The visual incongruities inherent in the relationship between two and three-dimensionality mimic the schisms between these ideas (or ideals) and the enactment of reality. His imagery is inspired by iconic literary characters, news stories, symbolic animals, and cartoon language. Matthew develops paired down compositions that are carefully considered to highlight active relationships between antagonists, implied narratives, and formal elements. His custom-built frames and specific display devices emphasize pictorial relationships and enhance a self-conscious viewing experience. These enigmatic and familiar compositions often depict sites of action or potential action that implicate the viewer’s imagination. For example, "Apparatus" initiates a dialogue around the use-value of trees, which equally includes the possibility of childhood rope swings and the history of lynching.
Matthew’s work creates a space to contemplate the violent history and oppressive forces that affect our concept of self, relationship to others, and our thinking and actions as individuals, families, collectives, and society as a whole – forces, not always overt, but insidious and present in the weaved fabric of everyday experience.