Sleight of Hand
Details
- Location: Los Angeles, California, USA
- Date: 17 February 2019
- Link: https://thenewsstandproject.com/MATT-HOPE
Description
From thenewsstandproject.com
THE NEWSSTAND PROJECT is pleased to present SLEIGHT OF HAND, an exhibition of recent work by London-born, Beijing-based artist MATT HOPE, organized by Alexis Hyde. SLEIGHT OF HAND will be on view by appointment at 8361 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA. 90048 from February 17 to March 23, 2019, with a public reception to be held on Sunday, February 17 from 11:00am - 1:30pm.
SLEIGHT OF HAND features selected recent drawings and sculptures from Hope’s expansive and enigmatic artistic practice, one consistently in conversation with aspects of architecture, engineering, industry, and technology. On view during this exhibition are a collection of intricate drawings hand-rendered onto paper through a digitally-derived image generation process. For their inception, Hope generates and manipulates three-dimensional models and spaces using various computer-aided design softwares. He subsequently hand-translates these digital compositions into two-dimensional drawings via a labyrinthian, draftsman-like mark making methodology. Intricate yet restrained, Hope’s drawings merge organic and synthetic imagery in fictitious extra-dimensional spaces, folding recognizable motifs into hallucinatory, yet unified scenarios.
Hope describes the exhibition title, SLEIGHT OF HAND, as “a slight play on words... slighting referring to the destruction of a castle [in Old English]. The drawings feature many scenes of decay and ruin, or blatant destruction, and synthetic hands, and robotic arms… [the employed digital processes being] a kind of technological threat to the artist’s hand via automated image generation techniques and thinking.”
Also in SLEIGHT OF HAND are two cast steel sculptures from a series of enlarged facsimiles of common construction tools, originally created in 2010 by a clandestine Chinese aerospace parts manufacturer. Acting as minimalist monuments to the engineering feats of the recent past, Hope examines these tools’ practical beauty by highlighting their Platonic form via contemporary fabrication techniques. Stark and unforgiving, Hope’s sculptures continue the ever-expanding post-minimal approach to art making. He utilizes twenty-first century industrial machine production techniques to construct towering meta-replicas of the very tools used during the process of their own creation.