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Artist Statement for Matthew Chase
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GERMINATION
Even the most casual ob server notices trash that litters our city. Cigarette butts, and plastic bottles clog our gutters and sidewalks. These discards, like the graffiti and the cracks in the pavement, are forms entropy. They represent the natural chaos permeating our high-tech cities. Even here natural law prevails.
On my walks through Brooklyn, I selectively collect these materials, foraging for specific discards like: orange plastic, Newport boxes, pink straws, and blue paper. Back in the studio I deconstruct these finds: boiling gum, blending paper, shredding plastic etc. Like the decomposition of a fallen tree, I transform the detritus into raw material. Decomposing the indecomposable.
Piece by piece, fiber by fiber, these bright, colorful substances are reformed on the walls, floors, and ceilings of the gallery. The application is slow and piecemeal like the germination of a fungus.
I am driven by the idea of creating my own ecology. Completing a missing link in the cycle of life by giving our waste a means to regenerate.
Growing out of cracks and across the walls of the sterile environment of a gallery, the forms resemble the pests and molds we so meticulously attempt to eradicate. Orange blades of grass flourish in the corners, while bubble gun insects devour Newport weeds.
I choose forms that resemble the nature of deconstruction. Insects, worms and funguses dismantle the dead plants and animals in the wilderness, and would devour our homes and food if we let them.
But of course, this installation isn’t nature. The colors are the gaudy hues of our consumables: orange, pink, and teal. Colors devised, not to blend, like in nature, but to be noticed: to be bought. Just as commercial art is made to be noticed and sold. And so the work speaks of the artists peculiar place between commerce and nature. The natural urge to create tamed by the necessity to sell.
And since this work adheres more to natural laws than to artistic conventions, the work grows throughout the space, engaging the viewer in the act of discovery. With installations on the floor, and ceiling, the viewer must become aware of the environment to find the work, and once discovered, the forms require further participation to reveal their history. Only after careful study does one realize that the bright red growth was once a french-fry container.
Germination is an investigation of our human existence in a time and place that seeks to separate us from our naturalness. Exploring the relationship of the natural, and the commercial by marrying the two, this project attempts to germinate ideas, while engaging the viewer in a satisfying sensory experience.
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