Artists Talk: Matthew Schlagbaum and Victoria Reynolds

Exhibition on view: March 11-April 22, 2017
Opening reception: Saturday, March 11, 5-8pm
Artist talk: Saturday, April 15, 4pm

Matthew Schlagbaum unites the media of sculpture, photography, and paint to depict metaphors for oppressive social structures that masquerade as universal ideals. Mainstream concepts of happiness, and their resulting recommended lifestyles, are exposed as methods of systematic social control. His images and sculptural objects are sometimes drained of color, viewed from behind, or seen as manipulated emotional and physical states of being that express the profound exclusion experienced by those who are not the intended audience.

Victoria Reynolds uses meat as a primary decorative motif, playfully applying it’s visceral qualities to the surface of the painting and the surrounding frame. There is an uneasy tension between the understanding of flesh as food, and our self-identification of it; her conflation of desire, mortality, viscerality, and the survival instinct is a powerful source of aesthetic fascination.