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Matthew Lusk is a true veteran of the olde-time Williamsburg/Greenpoint artsy days when rent was cheap, lofts were unheated and the possibilities of being a working artist were, well, possible. It is a different world out there now it seems, but thinkers like M. Lusk are still plying their craft and making incredible work the old fashioned way, with their brains, experience and talent that only comes from putting the time in.

We are proud to present our first show of the 2014 PF gallery season: Closed for Alterations, Matthew’s series of large-scale collages of tailor’s patterns on board, with mixed media elements and a treatment of acrylic and glaze with a faux-finisher’s graining comb along with an large installation piece that will complement the thought process and offer gallery denizens a bar to which “saddling up” would be the proper verbiage.

In a dream, I took my life with a gun. When it went off I did not wake up but saw myself for a while lying. Only then did I wake.

-Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street, 1928)

“These are all new or recent collages of images and paper tailor’s patterns on oil and acrylic backgrounds. Initially, I was just making compositions and putting gestural painty things and faux-bois finishes underneath the odd regularity of the men’s suit patterns. Then, after awhile, I decided that the compositions could bear the weight of some things I have been working with in my sculptural installations. These appear here mostly in the form of WPA photographs of the Great Depression; images of the poor, the unfortunate, the oppressed, and the environment they inhabited. And as a foil, some images of the forces that dominated over them. Overall, I think they’ve begun to reach a point where the regularity of the patterns and the irregularity of the painterly marks are made are joined in an ambivalent conflation in the same way that images of the dominant and its oppressed are an inseparable whole.” – M. Lusk