Mathew McConnell holds an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a BFA from Valdosta State University in Georgia. He has held numerous solo exhibitions including at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami and the Jane Hartsook Gallery at Greenwich House Pottery in NYC. His works have been included in over 60 group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Mathew has lectured widely, and has been subject of feature-length articles in Ceramics Art and Perception, Ceramics Monthly, and New Ceramics. He has received an Emerging Artist Award from the National Council on Education in Ceramic Art, and has been an Artist in Residence at the Archie Bray Foundation, Greenwich House Pottery, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center. He serves as an Associate Professor of Ceramics at the University of Arkansas School of Art.
The works in this series continue McConnell’s long exploration into the persistent problems of invention, originality, and creative influence in art making. Using duplication as a primary tool for exploring these questions, McConnell works directly from images of contemporary art—selecting, stealing, stretching, and manipulating sources—wringing them for inspiration for his idiosyncratic processes. His practice exists in an emphatically tight loop of influence and response, enabled by the connectivity of our digital era. Most important in the sources he chooses is simply the impetus they provide for the production of “new” work. The forms he produces vary between recognizable images, strategies, and tropes commonly found in contemporary art and forms seemingly outside the sources they claim to derive from.
The production of work for February February began with the collection of hundreds of images from exhibitions occurring in February of 2018 from contemporary art websites such as Contemporary Art Daily and Art Viewer. Throughout that month, images were downloaded, printed, and strewn across a table adjacent to the artist’s workspace—where he was simultaneously producing physical models (rendered in cardboard, tape, foam, fabric, and other readily available materials). Using the collected images as an expanding palette of compositional ideas, the production of these models occurred fluidly and intuitively, each one being quickly resolved before beginning the next. With the completed models, they were subsequently translated into precise earthenware facsimiles via plaster molds, and their surfaces carefully burnished into a deep black-metallic finish.
More art works: http://www.yicollecta.com/en/collections/56
Photos ©️ Mathew McConnell & YIART
