June 28th to August 3rd, 2008

Matthew Cusick: From What I’ve Read

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Matthew Cusick, an artist who uses archival materials of all sorts—from antique maps to Hollywood films—as the raw material for paintings, collages and video works. Two simultaneous processes are always occurring in Cusick’s work: he fragments information, studies and sorts it, then remakes it into images as he fashions the fragments into intricately inlaid collages. On one hand, this mode of working reflects his interest in the way the mind works, the way knowledge is acquired and the way language predetermines how ideas are constructed, while on the other it allows him to alter and comment on the content with which he is working by recombining the original material and framing it in new and provocative ways.

Throughout this exhibition Cusick is concentrating on material closely bound to his own personal history, specifically the historical, literary and religious texts of his parochial school education. For instance, he constructed a large piece entitled Ether from two books—a mosaic of pages from an old Western Civilization textbook forms the ground and a dense cloud of forms cut from the pages of a Catholic school bible proliferates above. Each of the foreground shapes has the appearance of a parachute and altogether they suggest the invasion of an immense airborne force. Cusick’s dissection of the books seems to enact the rebellious thoughts of an irreverent student frustrated by the classroom’s arbitrary logic and inconsistent teachings (and it is no coincidence that he cut up a bible printed in 1981, the same year he was expelled from parochial school). Meanwhile the image Cusick constructs in Ether re-frames the conflicting lessons he was taught in terms of warfare. The image is especially appropriate because much of Cusick’s work also stages another kind of battle, that between visual and verbal modes of thought. The cut-up
method has been used in writing and art as—to use the metaphor of William Burroughs, one of the technique’s notable proponents—an inoculation against the language virus. Cusick is up to something like this when he subjects printed material to a new visual order. Grammar is displaced and language re-ordered according to tonality, form and other purely visual criteria in order to undermine the power of rhetorical structures and allow new meanings to emerge.

The show takes as its title a phrase, ‘from what I’ve read,’ that is forever popping up in conversation. Its ubiquity reflects our common habits of mind, the way we all cull information from disparate sources, synthesize it into more-or-less true ideas of the world, make up and amend the provisional operating systems with which we deal with the moment-by-moment business of living. Cusick takes tangled threads of thought and reduces, reconfigures and refines it all into elegant visual distillations. The pieces in this exhibition range in size from a few inches to over eight feet wide; they are mischievous, cerebral, playful, satisfyingly dense, and frequently achieve a startling clarity.

Matthew Cusick was born in New York City, received his BFA from Cooper Union, and now lives and works in Denton, Texas. His work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally and is held in numerous public and private collections. His work may also be seen in 1968-2008, the Culture of Collage, a retrospective of contemporary collage now showing at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York City. For more information contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller: info@GHbookseller.com, 631-324-5511.