Chocolate, Bees, Dust, Sperm and Sprinkles

april - may 2009

Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Culver City, CA

Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art is pleased to present the photographic work of Matthew Brandt in what is his first one-person gallery exhibition. Brandt’s photographs (that term here broadly defined) seemingly spring from the self-referential logic of the 1960’s formalism. Clement Greenberg described this view as the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence But what then sounded like a reasonable formula for at production is now, in Brandt’s hands, taken to the unreasonable, that is to say, powerful and compelling extremes. The resulting body of photographs, collectively titled Chocolate, Bees, Dust, Sperm, and Sprinkles is thus formulaic in the best sense of this usually pejorative term.