On a rainy Saturday evening, a sterile, fluorescent glow illuminates the first floor of a building on a quiet street in Pilsen. Inside is Roxaboxen Exhibitions, a modest, single-roomed art space. Four large platforms built of cheap wooden fencing material, each garnished with a single oversized seashell, sit in the room’s fore; the rear of the space houses five cartoonish sculptures that nearly graze the low ceiling.
The exhibition, dubbed “Ate Time Share Decor Ate Time,” is the work of Chicago artist Matt Lane. Relics of middle-class American domesticity feature heavily in Lane’s pieces. From towering sculptures of stacked teacups in bright monochromatic hues to oversized renderings of mirrors, Lane showcases funhouse-style incarnations of mundane household items. His work, he says, “image-wise and aesthetic-wise is referencing home decor, and for me it’s reminiscent of timeshares in Florida.” His mirrors, for example, mimic the form of a cheap, faux-antique looking glass, complete with an ornately carved frame, but are made entirely of opaque, eerily pristine blonde wood. Even more bizarre is the swollen conglomeration of table parts in disarray in the back of the room.
This Floridian overtone is especially apparent in the large white seashells perched atop wooden platforms. Beyond simply referencing Florida’s many beaches, the shells illustrate Lane’s perception of Florida. Obnoxiously large and unblemished, the shells are shamelessly inauthentic. They are soulless replicas of their real-world counterparts, caricatures beaming behind hollow eyes. The same eerily uniform and unnaturally aseptic feeling prevails in timeshare communities due to their nature as shared, temporary residences. These prefabricated attempts at mass-producing comfort and coziness often ring unsettlingly false.
Thus, Lane creates digital depictions of common objects such as mirrors and dishes, and then constructs their physical referents, making tangible images that usually exist only in the limbo of digital pseudo-reality. For him, this process probes the distinctions between fine art and home decoration, “so I can explore the similarities and differences in artwork and the decorative vase or shelves,” he says, “And then also explore the shelves themselves, their form.”
His medium is in some ways more distinctive than his subject matter. To create these objects, he uses a woodcutting machine called a computer numerical controlled router (commonly known as a milling machine) to cut an image he designs on the computer into medium-density fireboard, a type of wood.
This technique, because it can create precise and realistic images in unconventional dimensions, allows Lane to successfully infuse the everyday with playful absurdity. His chosen subject matter furthers his successful distortion of “real life.” By choosing to dramatically warp the size, material, and color of utterly commonplace objects, Lane allows his medium to becomes the true star of the exhibition. He subordinates “meaning” to form. His work is a study in the milling machine medium, and his subject matter emphasizes the power of this medium through its comparative banality.
Roxaboxen Exhibitions, 2130 W. 21st St. Through October 26. Free. Hours by appointment through roxaboxen.minicastle@gmail.com