Exhibition: Chrysalis

Brood VI 17-Year Cicadas are due in Spring 2017. The main group will emerge in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. Lesser groups should emerge in Ohio and Wisconsin. These cicadas will begin to emerge when the soil 8 inches beneath the ground reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit. A nice, warm rain will often trigger an emergence.

For nearly two decades Matt Hoyt has been shaping a bevy of hand-made objects out of various clays and putties. The majority of his works are very small, shaped by devoted hands, subtly surfaced and worked over extensive periods of time. The pieces seem to hold a locked potential, willed into a kernel of physicality by the artist’s concentrated mental attention. Over the last two years he has seldom started a work from scratch, instead he refers back to a dense archive of previously initiated objects which exist in various states of completion. The reason for this, other than a simple desire to finish what was started, is a deliberate attempt to introduce further complexity into his process: tangling each object’s story through a daily activity of cutting, mending, scraping and filling. Sometimes returning to a piece years later, the original intention may be completely lost on the artist, requiring him to listen and respond only to the metaphysical history encoded in the form to prompt the succeeding steps. The works inhabit a state between the recognizable and peculiar, and their diminutive size begs a close look, imposing an intimate experience of a flickering between familiarity and strangeness. They might resemble organic forms such as vertebrae, exoskeletons, mollusks and sea pods or inorganic things like rocks, stone-age tools and architectural miniatures. The larger forms stand solemnly alone, while smaller forms cohere in arrangements of many: a multitude of innies and outies, slopes and spikes. These arrays imply a kind of animation from one piece to the next: an eruption of minute alterations that echo the artist’s practice. The adjustments imprint a complex time signature onto each piece, as a slow geological evolution washes over the work.

Dislodging a green nut from its shell is almost impossible, but let it dry and the lightest tap will do it. *

The exhibition features several of Hoyt’s largest individual objects to date, as well as three of his complex and dense arrangements of small works, some of which were shown earlier this year in his solo exhibition ‘Recent Past’ at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the artist’s first one-person museum show. Matt Hoyt (b. 1975, Mount Kisco, NY) lives and works in Brooklyn. Hoyt received his BFA in 2000 from the School of Visual Arts. Solo exhibitions include: Recent Past: 2010-2016, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; One Another, Art in General, 2015; It’s Always Nice to Meet You, Bureau, 2014; 2006-2011, Bureau, 2012; and Escalator to Common Art, with Mark Van Yetter, Dispatch, 2008. His work was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, as well as MoMA PS1’s 2010 Greater New York and Jay Sanders’s 2009 White Columns Annual. Other selected group shows include: Addicted to Highs and Lows, cur. Richard Aldrich, Bortolami, New York, 2011; and On Top of the Whale, cur. Olivia Shao, Mitchell Algus, New York, 2009. In 2013 Hoyt was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Grants to Artists Award. His work is in the public collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

 * The Gospel of Shri Ramakrishna