A Lower Animal
Matt Molloy's lugubrious and hybrid forms convey a vicarious sense of a mad scientist’s explorations. His selected materials hover at an uncomfortable closeness to our morbid fascinations and fears, like glancing upon an auto wreck too disturbing and delicious to ignore. The amalgamated sculptures and installations appear slimey, viscous, and mimic various states of porous flesh, creating a primal sensation for the viewer; the objects become stand-ins for vivid emotional and psychological states of being.
The exhibition’s title, A Lower Animal, refers to the order and classification of things in an image and spectacle saturated world. The brutality of repetition in images, media and everyday objects creates desensitisation, in turn subordinating the inherent values placed on the things we consume. Molloy describes the location of this condition as a “showground” and “battle zone,” where extreme and conflicting images and objects compete for our attention. His practice is concerned with discovering convergence points where new information and values can be assigned to signs and situations that were previously all too familiar.
Matt Molloy’s artworks develop out of experiments in the studio where rejected parts, accidents, and failures can be re-worked into new aesthetic territory. Like the painter that flips their canvas upside-down to freshly visualise a composition, Molloy also discovers new ways of creating objects and displaying them in unconventional means. This often leads to artworks that feature disparate parts joined together in a jarring and Frankensteinian manner. The process becomes a 3-dimensional response to the early collage works of Dadaists who attempted to unfurl radical meanings in existing images through striking and clashing juxtapositions.
Installation also allows Molloy to navigate different layers of reality which sit on the periphery of each other. Slaughterama appears as a visceral mass of desiccated limbs, artificial blood, stuffed rubbish bags, tarps, and foam. The casual nature in which these elements are nearly crammed into the back office space of the gallery questions its own status of existence. Is it being installed, packed up, or transported elsewhere? A popular installation strategy that provides generous amounts of space around artworks to designate it as such is rigorously ignored. The work spills out just inches away from the office desk and storage racks, blurring the suspension of disbelief traditionally sustained in exhibitions. All of the objects, whether part of the artwork or not, sit in relation to each other breaking down the walls between a fictional and mundane situation.
Perhaps the aftermath of a strange adventure or crime, Slaughterama’s vicinity to the working office and gallery staff, cheekily implicates the latter’s involvement in the event. The collision of fantasy and reality, art space and life space, brutality and humour contribute to the overall effect of Derrida’s notion of undecideability or what Freud might describe as the uncanny. Molloy asserts that this is the idea behind the grotesque – “the point where unusual and strange elements are experienced in the same instance as more familiar ones; where disgust and amusement are equally felt at the same intensity.” The Vienna Actionists and Jake and Dinos Chapman, Paul McCarthy, Janine Antoni, Mike Kelley, and Tony Tasset are some of the artists well-known for their no holds barred investigations into this arena.
Matt Molloy holds an MFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland and a BFA from Whitecliffe College of Art and Design. He was the winner of the 1st annual Young Blood Salon student artist competition and has previously held exhibitions at Cross St Studios and the Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland. This is his second solo exhibition with City Art Rooms.
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