Reception: RMG Fridays, December 2, 7-10pm
‘I’ve always been intensely determined to be happy, and I’ve often believed that I should be…But it comes over me now and then that I can never be happy in any extraordinary way; not by turning away, by separating myself.’
‘By separating yourself from what?’
‘From life. From the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer.’
– Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, 1881
Halton Hills-based artist Hillary Matt will install a series of recent, new, and site-specific work as part of her solo exhibition Chances and Dangers at Gallery A in The Robert McLaughlin Gallery. The work reflects her considerations toward the nature of signage and hanging flat objects; their ubiquity, accidental aesthetics, and complicated relationship to both language and images. The forms of flag poles, grocery store banners, beach towels, and laundry on clotheslines are mimicked. Surfaces are time sensitive and used as a space to document, encrypt, and repossess patterns, personal revelations, and lyrics that freckle everyday life.
Completed works to be included in the exhibition make use of collage, oil and acrylic painting, chrome-plated supports, large-scale photographs, and found textiles. New works will consist of a set of hand-poured concrete tiles inspired partly by the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a site-specific intervention that will muddy the line between artwork and sign.
Artist’s Biography:
Hillary Matt (b. 1990, Ontario) is a visual artist who makes flat works using image-based techniques, painting, and found materials. She conducts informal research that follows phonetic, metaphoric, and poetic associations across unrelated aspects of life and generates content for her work from her findings. Greatly inspired by car culture, music, and biographical information of famous people, she makes pictures that consider the fluidity of identity, meaning, and memory. Matt has shown her work with Carrier Arts Organization (Toronto) and Cooper Cole (Toronto). She holds a BFA from the Ontario College of Art & Design University. Chances and Dangers will be her first solo exhibition.