Borbala Szanto. Hyphen

About

The award, given each year, provides the recipient with a rent-free studio for one year at Martello Street, E8 — the SPACE studio where Robin Klassnik first opened Matt’s Gallery in 1979. Alongside Szanto has received mentoring from Klassnik and support from Jordan Baseman, Head of Moving Image, RCA.

Szanto’s exhibition is the fourteenth is a series of 10-day shows at Matt’s Gallery. The artist will create a new installation with modular elements or ‘hyphens’ that flicker between an archetype and a mental image, between what is present and what is imagined. Hyphen is an exercise in visual anticipation. 

The artist will explore the structural building blocks of the everyday home against the ever-changing architecture of a disproportionate global city-scape. Szanto seeks to enact shifts in scale - moving between units of measurement, life-size and maquettes, the quotidian and the global. Each sculptural element exists as ‘hyphen’ or spacer. 

Szanto has conceived of her exhibition in response to Tomas Klassnik’s architectural intervention into the fabric of the Gallery’s home in Ron Henocq’s studio at 92 Webster Road. The walls of the 3x3x3m cube become the borders of a staged universe. Planed timber and steel piping climb through the walls to alternately link and divide external and internal spaces. Metal knuckles and prosthetics-like solutions recall the joints of the human body.