Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2015
For Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2015, M+B presents LCDs, a new body of work by Matthew Brandt. These new lightboxes are inspired by our cultural consumption of information through LCD screens—computers, phones, tablets, televisions—and the illusion of interconnectivity they provide by masquerading as public spaces and democratizing platforms for receiving information. The lightboxes depict elaborate crowd scenes, hand drawn with resin on plastic and positioned between two polarized lenses, acknowledging LCD screen technology which employs similarly suspended crystal material. Brandt pulls the imagery from various public gatherings—rallies, concerts, sporting events—and uses the resin to abstract the picture, while the distorting lines in the PETG plastic reference the static distortion of television sets. As a liquid, the resin shifts and settles in different ways, expanding until it dries, proving to be a tricky and imprecise material. Just as the pixels of an image on an LCD screen are fluid and unfixed, the resin is a suspended liquid, speaking to ideas around the fluidity of information. Like the artist’s previous Lakes and Reservoirs series, image and liquid interact to allow for a loss of control that further completes the image. Matthew Brandt (b. 1982, Los Angeles) received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2004 and MFA from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2008. Brandt's precocious talent has landed him in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Armand Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Virginia), Cincinnati Art Museum (Ohio), North Carolina Museum of Art, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), among others. SHOWN: Matthew Brandt, LCD 55.2, 2015, plastic resin on plastic with polarization lenses in LED lightbox frame, 27-1/4 x 48-1/4, 2-3/4 inches, unique
