Matter to Scale
Guy Nelson, Leah Raintree, Brian Rattiner, Christine Howard Sandoval, and Laura Tack

Curated by Marion Guiraud and Leah Raintree

Matter to Scale is an exhibition featuring Guy Nelson, Leah Raintree, Brian Rattiner, Christine Howard Sandoval and Laura Tack, exploring time, scale and the environment through the limits and transformation of matter. Scaling is a measured process of reduction and amplification. Modeling to scale lends legibility to the material world through proportionate representations, while time-scales provide a tangible framework for durations beyond our immediate experience. In each, scaling inherently relies upon abstraction to distill complex systems and phenomena, requiring the elimination of particularities and nuance.

Matter to Scale offers alternatives to scaling, operating through the logic of these processes but in reverse. Rather than describing the material world through models and representations, the artists in the exhibition work directly with matter, engaging processes that record material interactions while pointing to scales beyond the works. In this condition, matter becomes the vehicle to oscillate between scales, without losing the intricacy of the material in use.

Direct action upon materials is central to the exhibition, with immediate, physical gestures producing impressions to the scale of the matter itself. These gestures, empirical in nature, include walking, striking, exposing, layering, comparing and tracing, with each work generating a tangible record of an otherwise ephemeral state. Throughout the exhibition, matter is addressed at points of oscillation: between natural and manmade conditions, entropy and formation, physical immediacy and distance. Each artist engages specific material processes by initiating or exploring varying states of flux.

More information here.

Video still from Christine Howard Sandoval’s “Sonar”