Matt Hoyt. Chrysalis

About

The majority of his works are very small, shaped by devoted hands, subtly surfaced and worked over extensive periods of time. The pieces seem to hold a locked potential, willed into a kernel of physicality by the artist’s concentrated mental attention. Over the last two years he has seldom started a work from scratch, instead he refers back to a dense archive of previously initiated objects which exist in various states of completion. The reason for this, other than a simple desire to finish what was started, is a deliberate attempt to introduce further complexity into his process: tangling each object’s story through a daily activity of cutting, mending, scraping and filling. Sometimes returning to a piece years later, the original intention may be completely lost on the artist, requiring him to listen and respond only to the metaphysical history encoded in the form to prompt the succeeding steps.

The works inhabit a state between the recognizable and peculiar, and their diminutive size begs a close look, imposing an intimate experience of a flickering between familiarity and strangeness. They might resemble organic forms such as vertebrae, exoskeletons, mollusks and sea pods or inorganic things like rocks, stone-age tools and architectural miniatures. The larger forms stand solemnly alone, while smaller forms cohere in arrangements of many: a multitude of innies and outies, slopes and spikes. These arrays imply a kind of animation from one piece to the next: an eruption of minute alterations that echo the artist’s practice. The adjustments imprint a complex time signature onto each piece, as a slow geological evolution washes over the work.

The exhibition features several of Hoyt’s largest individual objects to date, as well as three of his complex and dense arrangements of small works, some of which were shown earlier this year in his solo exhibition ‘Recent Past’ at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the artist’s first one-person museum show.