Bureau is pleased to announce our first one-person exhibition with Matt Hoyt.
The exhibition will run from January 8 through February 12 2012 at 127 Henry Street, between Rutgers and Pike streets, in the Lower East Side.
Matt Hoyt will present a suite of work, in eight arrangements comprising small, hand-made objects, placed in combination on simple shelf supports. Some pieces seem dense, solid and polished, some fractured or bruised and some are bluntly cut, showing the many layers intrinsic to the artist’s building up and construction. Textures and patinas are worked over a considerable length of time, highlighting subtle volumes and amorphous shapes. There is an occasional hint of resemblance, as if a fleeting lost memory comes into focus; we may see what looks like a stone-age tool or a favorite sea shell. Hoyt’s work, however, quickly defies any categorization; instead the viewer is left with a kind of psychic strangeness transmitted from each piece, and intensified by the artist’s carefully-considered compositions and amalgams.
Hoyt suggests that there is no front or back to any given piece; they can be seen from any angle, resting on any side, held in a hand, or between fingers, as their scale seems to imply. For the occasion of an exhibition, decisions are taken and objects rest, held in tight resonant compositions in groups of two, three and many objects. The exhibition is thus part of an expanded time-line in the life of the unique pieces. The myriad of materials used by the artist brings a complex set of histories to the work, and time itself plays a central role in their creation. Each piece is the result of a complex series of operations – mechanical, chemical, geological, artistic or psychic – some within and many outside of the artist’s control. As the title of the show suggests, the pieces are created over many years, unfolding and re-folding, as tiny mutations and adjustments are made.
The works also reflect a series of scenarios playing in the artist’s mind; a lengthy process that weds imagination, natural and chemical history and material experimentation. “The pieces are never the execution of a technique nor the expression of any clear and logical idea or concept.” They are, in and of themselves, utterly autonomous and beautifully strange things.
Matt Hoyt (b. 1975, Mount Kisco, NY) received his BFA in 2000 from the School of Visual Arts. In 2010, his work was included in Greater New York at MOMA|PS1 and he will be included in the upcoming 2012 Whitney Biennial. Past exhibitions in New York include group shows at Mitchell Algus 2010 and 2009, a two-person show, ‘Escalator to Common Art’ with Mark Yetter at Dispatch in 2008, a solo project at Marquise Dance Hall, Brooklyn, and the 2011 exhibition ‘Addicted to Highs and Lows’ curated by Richard Aldrich at Bortolami. In Europe he has shown with Marquise Dance Hall, Istanbul and Coco Kunstverein, Vienna. Hoyt lives and works in Yorktown Heights, NY.
