Review: Colin Matthes’ EXPO at IGLOO

As seemingly improvised as his loose painting style—all brushstrokes and dripping paint—Colin Matthes’ installation, EXPO, at IGLOO Gallery features sculptures held together by clamps and propped up on cement blocks and milk crates, paintings leaning against or done directly on the walls, and drawings tacked up in the back room around a grocery cart modified into a mobile throne.

The Milwaukee-based Matthes, in Portland for an IGLOO residency, gave a slide talk at PNCA leading us through his work that most often addresses political and environmental concerns, natural resource management, imperialist warmaking, surveillance (he’s made and installed birdhouses in the shape of surveillance cameras). With a view to what he calls, “nostalgic futures,” Matthes makes wall drawings and sculptures/installations that in form and function reference the improvisatory, fake, and provisional nature of Potemkin villages, stage sets, and Wild West one-horse-town facades. His visual vocabulary includes milk crate as symbol of making do, the stripes and palette of carnival tents as both the temporary and the spectacle, and tangles of undulating blue lines as water that can either pose threat to the figures floating on improvised rafts or be threatened by an offshore oil drilling platform.

In EXPO, the water’s drained away and a damaged row boat bearing a spyglass and a milk crate is held aloft on stilt-like 2x4s. Elsewhere water’s contained in a tin tub in which floats a raft (a prototype?) made from Shell and Exxon signs. The repurposing of corporate signage places blame for the global warming that’s clearly on Matthes’ mind, but points as well to improvised survival strategies. In another painting, there’s a tall pink cylindrical hat from from which two plastic milk bottles are suspended on either side making a possible water carrying device. Matthes says EXPO is primarily, “what I imagine an inventors’ convention would look like in the future…that’s small “i” inventors, the kind you’d see on an infomercial. I’m drawn to ingenuity with crappy materials, the small gesture, the simple victory.” One terrific “invention,” a painting of extravagant multi-wheeled vehicle of questionable purpose, begins on a board leaning against the wall and spills over onto the wall itself. This has the effect both of emphasizing Matthes’ notions of improvisation (like the old joke of the “Plan Ahea” sign) and temporariness while integrating the individual works into the whole of the installation. On the other hand, the quick black and white portraits, head-shots, really, tacked up in the lower space feel a bit tossed off, even supposing they are meant to represent the crowd at the EXPO. Signage recurs in Matthes’ work, but whereas in earlier pieces the signs had been an explicit and overdetermining factor, at EXPO we see only half words and truncated phrases creating a productive ambiguity. Like this crazy “inventors’” fair, they invite speculation and conversation about Mattes’ imagined future.