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Williamsport is proud to welcome back artist Matthew Rose from Paris, France, as he brings his third solo exhibition, "Evidence: Drawings and Misdemeanors" to Converge Gallery, 140 W. Fourth St. The show will run through Sept. 30.
Rose's works are collected both publicly and privately in the U.S. and Europe. His text prints, "Paintings," are permanently installed at The Boca Raton Museum of Fine Art, Boca Raton, Florida; and his global project, "A Book About Death," is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Born in New York in 1959, Rose graduated from Brown University in Semiotics, studying linguistics, art, film and writing. While painting and producing collage works, he wrote about New York's art scene, principally the East Village, but also other areas in the art world that involved Fluxus, Dada and Mail Art.
As a child, Rose drew maps of his family, with circles and arrows, and captioned each of them with keywords. As he grew older, he continued doing this with other relationships, objects and ideas.
"Art is a way to engage the mind and the heart and others; it's a way to think and communicate in fable and comics, in shapes and colors, in language that is bent and folded, and crumpled and broken," he said. "I think most families afford children this world view, but it's often drummed out of them. I've been fighting since forever to scratch out what I see as the proper portions to things and people, relations, words and images."
In 1992, Rose moved to France, where he currently lives and works. Rose produces large-scale collage works, installations, drawings and a wide variety of objects. He has exhibited widely in both Europe and the United States in sometimes floor to ceiling installations collage works. His most recent exhibition with Converge Gallery was the wildly successful The Letters (2013) in which 333 works were all mailed to the gallery.
Rose is currently working on two projects: "Suicide Specials," a collage suite, and "One Thousand Queens," a work based upon the seminal power of image of Queen Elizabeth's silhouette. The latter just debuted in Rijeka, Croatia.
Rose's art is mostly inspired by accidents, random events, things he finds in the street, old books and magazines and fragments of conversations he overhears. For him, art is more than a theory and much more than a filler for an empty wall.
"It has the potential to be a powerful prism to see and understand the world, to teach both artist and viewer, to stir the desire and scratch the itch for design, composition, and beauty," he said. "It's about examining our lives seriously but with a healthy dash of humor."
Rose's current show at Converge Gallery consists of large and small format works he made in 2007 and 2008. Most of the pieces are simple graphite drawings on paper, and recall quiet but sinister stories about childhood war, avarice, love, family violence and political corruption, as well as the banality and complexity of our feelings and how we can and can't access them.
Caterina Verde, artist, curator and friend of Rose, helped put together the show as curator, designing a beautiful catalog and writing a powerful text about the work.
"Matthew Rose's approach to his work is a mixed arsenal of attacks, and for this selection of drawings and collage, I have a special penchant," Verde said. "The drawings are terse and spacious."
Verde writes in the catalog: "This selection could be viewed as cacophonous and mute but it does have three distinct visual facets: a frenetic and busy style jammed and slammed together with the fondness and banality of the everyday that takes you on a sociological scavenger hunt; the single word mantra whose imagery pushes against language and the completely mute and mutant forms landing on branches and roof tops threatening, gloaming, pudgy and comic. These in combination with one another make a particularly poignant and powerful exhibition that synthesizes at a perfect time in our political climate."
The catalog is 60 pages, color, signed and dated, and available from Converge Gallery.
"There are approximately 35 graphite on paper drawings, as well as a work, 'Evidence,' a book in a ring binder that sits on a table in the gallery window," Rose said. "An old-fashioned library lamp rides above. It's for study and contemplation."
The book was made this year on Rose's trip to the U.S. There are 34 pages, with each page a collage of a vintage photo of a man or woman posed in front of his or her car.
"The car is a show piece, a trophy, a mark of success or personality; and these people are pleased to use the car as prop for their personalities, dreams or wallpaper of their lives," Rose said. "Below each image, I wrote a one or two sentence narrative that appears to indicate the essence or afterthoughts of some crime. "Taken together, these are evidence but from the point of view that itself is suspect."
Many of the drawings feature ravens gathering on branches above crooked and tilting houses -- these are somewhat dark and twisted and appear as fables.
"I used a raven image I picked up from a trip to Sri Lanka as my guide to this world of woe," Rose said. "My guess is that many people will not 'get' these pieces, but perhaps something will soak in."
Another piece, "Visit Iraq," is a graphic drawing that features a raven's head atop a body - it appears as a hood. The reference is to the torture, rape, sodomy and human rights violations the CIA committed against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"Other works like 'American' and 'Rolling' are large, almost collage-like drawings that mesh together a visual poetry and graphic narrative," Rose said. "Think comics on acid scribbled by a precocious child."
There are many smaller text works as well that touch upon language -- "Babel," and slogans -- "Hope Is Not a Plan."
"There's also one gold leaf 'scatter' collage that might sum up the state of planet for many: 'The End of the World' -- a rubber stamp of this text is printed on the piece," Rose said.
Rose was enormously pleased on opening night, when two nuns from a local Williamsport church came to the opening and carefully looked at every piece in the show with an intensity he said he had never witnessed.
"One of the nuns sat in the window of the gallery and spent a good 15 minutes reading and examining every page of the 'Evidence' book; and the other nun, her friend, joined her and they continued through the end," he said. "It was an incredible moment -- a truly delightful gift to me as the artist to have such attentive viewers and readers."
Rose believes this is one of the most urgent exhibitions he has had, having done 50 shows across Europe and the U.S.
"It's certainly the most focused," he said. "The front window, the 'Evidence' centerpiece, is, for me, a great work that I would like all of Williamsport to step inside and see and absorb. It's a piece of theater for a small town -- and it explodes."