BE THERE
Matthew Weinstein 2006Presented by Sonnabend January 7, 2006- February 11, 2006Matthew WeinsteinOn January 7, 2006 the Sonnabend Gallery will open an exhibition of new works by Matthew Weinstein.The exhibition explores and mythologizes the acts of exchange of information, aggression and love between two bodies. Using an array of techniques (bronze casting, 3-D animation, computer lathing, auto body painting and performance), Weinstein creates a world that spans the nineteenth and twenty first centuries, both technologically and ideologically, incorporating the Gothic, the Romantic, the Utopic, and the Futuristic. In ‘Three Love Songs From the Bottom of the Ocean,’ Weinstein writes the lyrics to three love songs that glorify the pains of attachment and separation. He worked with musician Jonathan Dinerstein and actress Blair Brown to transform these lyrics into three recorded songs. He created an animated talking Japanese Koi who sings these songs inside a virtual submerged theater. In ‘The Triumph of Painting,’ two human skeletons were painstakingly cast in bronze and gilded. The skeletons are suspended from the ceiling of the gallery, one of them is tossing a Frisbee and the other is catching it. The sculpture becomes a gigantic memento mori or life-sized image by Posada. The game, winning, triumph, power, fantasies of domination and the concept of infinite pleasure are mocked by the most recognizable image of finality, the skeleton. A group of five paintings, whose images were composed in the 3-D program Maya, transferred onto a computer lathed wooden substrate and then detailed by an auto body painter, depict plant forms engaged in battles of will. Derived from Weinstein’s series of three-dimensional renderings of stark Japanese Ikebana flower arrangements, these images depict a secret world of battling and communicating plants, upsetting their environment as they reach towards each other in gestures of affection or hostility. War tints the entire spectrum of communication with aggression and dissolves the fantasy that it is not present within the day-to-day exchanges of love, ideas and information between people. War becomes the way we approach each other and the way we enter each other as if no other way was possible. The exhibition will continue through February 11.
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