Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles based artist Christy Matson. Marking her second presentation at the gallery, Matson debuts a new series of woven paintings that distill and explore abstraction, landscape and the relationship between reality and imagination.
Titled West of West, Matson’s exhibition assembles works symbolizing both nature and spirit. Referencing the broad topography of the Pacific Coast, a region integral to the artists life, Matson considers the epic geography and eco-systems of the greater western seaboard through nostalgia, the contemporary lens of climate change, and social division, resulting in imagined mythical spaces created through combinations of color, texture, and composition. Beginning each piece as a memory drawing, a sketch inspired by places or spaces Matson has experienced in real time, the exhibition functions as a biographical map, a record of tangible moments absorbed at differing speeds, navigated by touch and feel.
Working on a hand-operated, computerized loom, the works in West of West also contend with the duality of integrating technology and the limitless cyber-oriented realm with Matson’s profound sense of awe vis-à-vis the natural world. She weighs the implications of a digital footprint and biometric tracking against her commitment to sustainable materials and climate mitigation, wondering if there will come a time when unmapped space can only be experienced by engineered learning. Matson maintains that the same use of innovative methods and unconventional goods necessary to make her weavings is required to imagine a bright future for our planet.
Christy Matson was born in 1979 in Seattle WA. She studied at the University of Washington and at the California College of the Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include The Milwaukee Art Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, which featured a special commission for the US Art in Embassies Program, and the Long Beach Museum of Art. Her work has been in dozens of group exhibitions including the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum, the Craft and Folk Art Museum Los Angeles, the Asheville Art Museum, and The Knoxville Museum of Art. Matson’s work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cranbrook Art Museum, The Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Renwick Gallery. In 2012 Matson was tenured and appointed as Associate Professor of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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