Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Matthew Monahan, Five Years Ten Years Maybe Never, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Los Angeles, 2007


A rather curious exhibition catalogue which consists of 3 booklets joined together in an accordion format. Since I've never seen anything like this before I thought it was worthy of inclusion here. In the last section are 3 accordion fold-outs of the artists' works. I had never heard of this LA-based artist, but this was a substantial one-person exhibition. Following is a text describing the publication from the Moca website: 

"Matthew Monahan (b. 1972, Eureka, CA) creates striking sculptures that are built from drawings, as well as fragments of smaller artworks made with disparate materials, including floral foam, beeswax, glitter, pins, Styrofoam, glass, and drywall. From these unlikely media, he builds freestanding, assemblaged sculptures within which hand-crafted characters—warriors, saints, slain heroes, and demons—seem to express heroic emotions ranging from jubilation to anguish. These figures serve as both icons and iconoclasts in a purposefully allusive narrative from a mysterious unidentified past epoch. Working simultaneously as both chronicle and summation of the artist’s creative processes, Monahan’s sculptures confront the formal issues inherent in figurative drawing and sculpture while addressing his artistic, personal, and political concerns. This MOCA Focus exhibition—Monahan’s debut solo museum presentation—brings together a decade of work never before exhibited in Los Angeles."

Booklet sizes 9"(h) and 6.25"(w), when opened 3ft 2".





back of the catalogue

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