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Drive of Eyes
Kelly Kaczynski & Todd MatteiA New Installation of Video, Digital Imagery, Drawings and Sculptures
February 3, 2006 - March 11, 2006
Opening Reception: Friday, February 3, 2006, 6-9pm
CHICAGO, IL -- rowlandcontemporary is excited to present Drive of Eyes, a collaborative exhibition by Kelly Kaczynski and Todd Mattei. This installation is the first exhibition by the artists with the gallery. Drive of Eyes enhances rowlandcontemporary's reputation for presenting provocative works by contemporary artists.
Drawing on specific references rooted in the artists' personal and temporal spaces, this exhibition of video animation, digitally constructed images, drawings and sculpture asks us to decide where truth ends and fiction begins.
With its center firmly out of focus, there is no narrative in this exhibition - there is no time, no space. In the realm of the experiential, Kaczynski and Mattei's work is impulse and reason in conversation with each other. "We are continuously dismantled and reconfigured by the outside world. So the impulses and responses that one finds in the work are not of us as individuals, but the world itself as cognitive matter." Idiosyncratic cognition forms an accretion of experience and understanding. Only in the negative spaces is there a memory of comprehension.
Everything is what it is and nothing is what it seems. The work of Kaczynski explores the relationships of both the physical world and the landscape of the mind. Using collected ephemera and finely crafted objects she introduces us to a highly personal tautology. Referencing both the body and the landscape, but firmly neither, she explores relationships that distress the viewer's knowledge of fact and fiction.
Mattei's ethereal explorations through video and constructed imagery reinforce the notion of the shattered center. Positioning themselves amongst painting and photography, yet devoid of hierarchy and linearity, they resolutely resist stratification; resolving themselves only through viewing the whole. Moments of irregular circumstance and pulses of digitally abstracted images combine to distill a solitary vantage point that is at the very locus of the viewer's experience.
Kelly Kaczynski lives and works in Chicago. She received her MFA from Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, and her BA from The Evergreen State College. Olympia, WA. She has exhibited at Triple Candie, New York, NY, Essex Art Center, Lawrence, MA, the Boston Public Library, Boston, MA, and Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, MA. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Art New England.
Todd Mattei received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, and his BA from Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA. He has exhibited at the NOVA Young Art Fair, Chicago, IL, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI, and SWELL Gallery, San Francisco, CA. An accomplished writer and musician, Mattei's work has been published in the Journal of Experimental Fiction (2002) and he was a member of the music group Joan of Arc. Currently he writes, records and performs with the band Sharks and Seals.
