Velvet and Bubble Wrap

DECEMBER 2013 - JANUARY 2014

M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

M+B is pleased to announce Matthew Brandt: Velvet and Bubble Wrap, the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery featuring new work that explores Hollywood as both a construct and a landscape. The exhibition runs from December 14, 2013 through January 18, 2014, with an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, December 14 from 6 to 8 pm.

Presented in this show are some new works made in my studio in Hollywood, California. Here is a list, in no particular order, of some of the materials involved: velvet + acid + bubble wrap + dust + cocaine + H + aluminum + light + nebulae + cyan hair dye + magenta hair dye + yellow hair dye + black hair dye + Hollywood gaps + stripes + torsos + friends

- Matthew Brandt, Hollywood, November 2013

Cocaine, the Hollywood Sign, plush velvet, cheap fantasies, interchangeable personalities, identities of affect, trends, bubbles, stars, and slick surfaces—Brandt directly employs Hollywood tropes and transforms them, prodding and mixing the stereotypical, material signifiers of identity in the Los Angeles landscape.

Matthew Brandt’s images physically incorporate the work’s subject matter into his creative process, tethering conceptual creativity to material production and furthering the read. Starry night skies typically obliterated by city lights are elegantly composed in swirls of cocaine on black velvet. Torsos donning patterned and striped shirts are burned and etched onto fields of pristine white silk velvet. Gaps between the letters of the Hollywood sign are printed in hair dye on bubble wrap, glowing in abstracted scenes.