Christy Matson | The Cloud

Philip Martin Gallery is proud to present, "The Cloud," a solo exhibition of new woven, wall-mounted works by Los Angeles-based artist Christy Matson.

Christy Matson's woven wall-mounted works combine the skill, sensitivity and craft of painting and hand weaving with the artist-directed process of an industrial Jacquard loom. The result is an art object of beauty and depth that reveals important details with regard to art objects, how we make and look at them. Matson begins her process with watercolors, ink drawings, collages and other works on paper. She then uses a digital process to translate these compositions into instructions her loom can understand, and, as she works the machine, improvises on the weft (horizontal rows) with creativity and nuance.

The loom Christy Matson uses, a Jacquard loom, was patented in the early 19th-century by French industrialist Joseph Marie Jacquard. Originally a card-driven device, the Jacquard loom has a remarkable ability to process information and organize complex operations, and is now generally seen as the progenitor of modern computers. In Matson’s hands, the Jacquard loom is a machine of precision and spontaneity, blending both analog and digital aspects. She notes, "I work back and forth between very analog materials, whether that is physical yarn itself that I paint on, or marks that I make on paper. I then use a digital process to make a physical object with a tangible presence that functions both like a painting and a textile, with the all the history of both mediums, and an awareness of modern tools and computer process.” 

"I think about textiles in relationship to body, in that there is a certain kind of physicality we have in inhabiting our own bodies. Textiles are a nice metaphor for that," Matson says. "I think about the Jacquard loom as a drawing device, or drawing tool. On my loom, I can make what appear to be organic and flowing lines, raise certain areas, put in a line of yarn, or material. I think about it as if I had a pen or paintbrush.” Matson's pieces work both haptically and intellectually, connecting us emotionally and physically to the pieces we see and to their deeply psychic ordering system - the grid. Long a topic for painting and industry alike, "There is something psychologically grounding about the idea of a grid," Matson comments "It is simultaneously an organizing structure, it is a pattern, but it is also a principle in general." Her support, "the canvas itself, the linen, is a grid. It is a weaving. It is an interlacement of threads, with paint on top of it." 

"One of the things I have always loved about hand-weaving is that it is the simultaneous building of the structure and the image at the same time." Matson suggests that the history of textiles and painting is “the ingenuity of the human brain working its way out over time,” engaging in an underlying conversation of shared experience. In Christy Matson's work, we see expression and perception, ideas and information, helping us better understand ourselves, and the world in which we live.