Say you are represented by the most innovative gallery space in the Northwest – simultaneously a warehouse, salon, white cube and video theater. It’s your turn. You can do whatever you want there, take as much space as you want. If you’re Matt Browning, you want to burrow into the furthest corner of the deepest back space (in the salon), wall off the fireplace and use its top as a shelf for a miniature forest of palm-sized, reconstituted trees whittled into cone-like wedges full of boiled pine sap. Other than that, the room is empty.
In the middle of the worst environmental disaster since the Ice Age, Browning’s modesty is appealing. Appealing and deceptive. It takes a major artist to pull off this kind of scale shift.
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.A. E. Housman
But begin the game anew…too little, too late, but imperative nonetheless.
Browning, detail:
Titled Tradition as Adapative Strategy, Browning’s foray into the world of back-porch whittlers builds the conceptual from a foundation of masculine craft. Each piece comes from one block of wood he carved into a cone suspended from a brace. He poured the pitch into the cones, which are also funnels.
And time machines. Like oil in water, the pitch will continue to move at its own leisurely imperatives. (See Thomas Parnell’s Pitch Drop Experiment at the University of Queensland.)
Browning conceived of his show before the Gulf of Mexico promised to become a dead zone, but surely he saw it coming. A consumer society consumes itself. After eight deregulated years of the Bush administration, the self-consumption is an orgy. Browning’s adaptive strategy offers no solutions, save for the most basic.
In the face of ruin, the handy man make something. He jerry-rigs a repair and failing that, fashions a memorial. Drawing on skills passed down from generations, he speaks to future generations with his actions: Take up your bed and walk, or, as Fergus said in The Crying Game, pick up your teeth with broken fingers.
Jen Graves on Matt Browning here. Through June 26.
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