Time Out Chicago 
Issue # 132 : September 6 – September 12
2007

Yes I Kansas

All Rise Gallery

Aug. 19th – Sept. 14, 2007

YES I KANSAS

Alicia Eler

Fields of wheat stretching as far as the eye can see may come to mind when we think of Kansas (its slogan is “As big as you think,” after all). The curators of this group show have set out to radically alter our preconceived notions but end up with mixed results. The Sunflower State might seem like the most boring place in the world, but these Kansas artists prove they’ve got more than grain on their minds.

With a gentle hand and stick of graphite, Matt Wycoff creates softly shaded black-and-white portraits of the people who matter most in projects with such self-evident titles as 100 Portraits of My Girlfriend (2005–2006) and Everyone I’ve ever met Who Has died.  Unassuming drawings of his girlfriend smiling, poker-faced or looking away cover an entire wall of the gallery. Wycoff never mentions her name, lending a sense of universality to the work. On the opposite wall, six portraits of people who have died—some twentysomething guys, a little girl and an old man—have a powerful, eerie, ghostly feel. Wycoff’s steady, eloquent drawings of love and loss are the strongest works in this show.

In contrast, Aaron Storck’s collage Crab Tropics is a visually dizzying mess of a crab, lemons splattered with blood, piles of raw fish, and fireworks topped off with slivers of gold leaf  that seem contrived.  Christa Dalien’s Marcel Dzama–like drawings and lithographs of innocuous, blank-faced girls in weird costumes like Tree Girl (wearing a pointed hat and flowing dress made of tree bark) feel like simple CD cover art.

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Review magazine
September Issue
2007

Matt Wycoff: Strategies for Representation

Alaska Noyes

After seeing Matt Wycoff’s work for the first time, I knew I would return to it. He was having a solo show, Strategies for Representation, at the Dolphin Gallery this spring. Before setting foot inside, through the windows I could see four huge abstract color-field paintings looming on the far wall. They were so radiant, they seemed to be self-illuminated – blinding the passersby in the dark street and catching me like a deer in the headlamps. I had recently been subjecting myself to a kind of mind numbing hipster art that exists purely for the sale of style. I had seen too much Victorian decadence and a few too many off-handed illustrations, making me want to gouge out my eyes with the very deer antlers that pervade these works. Needless to say, Wycoff’s luminous and serene paintings intrigued me, and upon entering the gallery I was impressed by the breadth and depth of this artist’s work

Abiding by the modern existential thesis: individual existence precedes universal essence, Wycoff utilizes the empirical experiences of his own life as the subject matter for his art. His show is calculated, obsessively clean and reductive, having as much in common with 1960’s conceptualism – think On Kawara, as with post-minimalism – think Tom Friedman. Wycoff’s primary medium of choice is simply graphite on white paper in the form of lists, anagrams, poems, and portraiture from observation and from photography. In fact, the only color pieces in the entire show were the aforementioned paintings.

These color-field paintings were immaculate, every brush stroke painstakingly smoothed over and obliterated. The comparisons to glowing computer screens and Polaroid photography were just as viable as references to the work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Where the major rift occurs between Wycoff’s color fields and his more gestural predecessors, however, is revealed by the title of these pieces – Color Field Paintings Loosely Inspired by Color I see During Orgasm I – IV. The title, and this is often the case with Wycoff’s work, acts as a window through which we can directly see the artist’s life. Through this window, we are taken from the theoretical ether back down to earth, in all its sweaty guttural realism. The opposite could be said of Wycoff: he reaches the sublime and transcendental through the most mundane and primitive act – coming full circle, and to a persuasive theme running throughout his work – bridging the gap between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

An anagram is a word of phrase made from another by rearranging its letters. Making poignant use of this linguistic game, Wycoff presented a series of five meticulously written and framed anagrams offering such disparate juxtapositions as: The Lords Prayer / Grocery List, and The Preamble To The Constitution / Letter To My Mother. With these blatant demonstrations of the aforementioned theme, Wycoff literally fashions the ordinary from the extraordinary. By dismantling The Pledge of Allegiance, for instance, letter-by-letter he arrived at this revelatory statement:

I founded this project / body of ideas between the language, will, and logic of the personal, “I,” and the universal b/c our total diligence to filling that difference / pit is a clear high ideal.

Wycoff always comes back to that major existential preoccupation – the finiteness of his own life in contrast to the eternal and universal – trying to bridge the chasm between life and mind, between thought and action. Although these concerns have the potential of being disordered, abstruse or downright disconcerting, Wycoff approaches them with unwavering optimism. It is in his sense of adventure, thirst for life and his humor that makes his work particularly refreshing.

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Review magazine
January Issue
2007  

Six died during construction

Rare Gallery, New York, New York

Oct. 7th - Nov. 4th, 2007

Matt Wycoff at Rare Gallery

Catherine Archias

The great secret about Matt Wycoff, in spite of his cerebral tendency, is that he is extravagantly romantic. The show, " Six died during construction ," on view at Rare Plus in New York's Chelsea district is largely about Wycoff's relationship with New York since his move there in 2005. The title comes from the Ric Burns docu-saga, " New York ." Wycoff fell asleep watching the documentary and woke up to hear a reference to the number of casualties caused during the frenzied construction of the Empire State Building in 1930-31.

Of the four pieces in the show at Rare plus, three use the grid as a formal structure. The grid works here as a form within which Wycoff can explore the expression of his profound romanticism. With the use of the grid and the list Wycoff aligns himself with early minimalists, stripping away easy visual information. What distinguishes Wycoff from his influences is the melodrama that he confines within the grids' squares. " Six died during construction ," is a necessarily timid melodrama. It hums with awareness of loss, of the frustration of loving, and the fat onus of major disaster. Through the use of the grid the swell of Wycoff's emotion is spun into something more taut. Without the constraints of the grid, of language and an impartial system, the helium of his own romantic sensibility threatens the work.

The piece, " 100 portraits of my girlfriend ," is presented as an 18-foot grid of 11 x 14 inch pencil drawings. Use of the grid in this instance works as a kind of dissection. Wycoff seems to be trying to figure something out, not necessarily obsessing over his girlfriend, or even admiring her, but more investigating his relationship to her. The next piece is also a large grid of portraits installed into the corner of the gallery titled, " Everyone I met in my first six months in New York City ." It is a collection of 140, 11 x 14 inch pencil drawings of artists and non-artists, mostly youngish, relatively expressive people. By way of a detailed pencil sketch, Wycoff takes possession of them and the moment in which he met them. He is giving form to his compulsion to freeze and capture the people he meets.

The third piece in the show is an oversized sketch of his brother in law - a big suspended head titled, " Portrait of my brother in law delivering a sermon ." This may be the most interesting piece in the show. Its presence in this show, in this gallery, creates a collision of worlds - one being more than likely provincial, the other in the heart of one of the world's largest art centers.

The final piece, " Survey of disaster, war, and death during the first twenty-five years of my life ," also makes use of the grid format and the list. It attempts to detail all of the disasters (both man made and natural) that have occurred in the world from 1980 through 2005, where the disaster occurred, and how many individuals died. It is pencil on paper; each incident is confined to its rectangle on the grid. It is Wycoff's use of the grid for complex, emotional, confusing and romantic subject matter that makes this piece, and the show as a whole interesting. It is the contrast between the content and the form that gives Wycoff's work merit. Indeed, the dozens of portraits of his girlfriend do not, in themselves, reveal a lot about this woman, nor do the other portraits featured here give more than an illusion as to Wycoff's relationship with the subject.

In response to a question about his influences for the show, Wycoff quoted a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald's essay, " My Lost City " as important to his thinking about the show.

"From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as the eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then understood-everything was explained: I had discovered the crowing error of the city; it's Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits - from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that the city faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless."

This impassioned string of words reveal Fitzgerald's romantic vision of New York City and the inevitable loss of that romance. Like Fitzgerald, Wycoff brings to New York an eager, anticipatory faith. He aspires. And this show is an expression of that aspiration. As he places his experiences within grids on the wall, so he represents his own energy upon the grid of Manhattan.

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Review magazine
June Issue
2005  

Quote

Avenue of the Arts, Kansas City, Missouri

Mar. - Sept. 2005

Avenue of the Arts, 2005

Marcus Cain

Carrying a conceptual-art torch during this year's Avenue of the Arts program is former local artist Matt Wycoff. Wycoff who graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2002, recently moved to New York City following the conclusion of a solo exhibition at Urban Culture Project's Paragraph Gallery. For those who saw that show (Oh Baby You), it presented his current range of conceptual projects utilizing discreet text, photography, and drawing that served as a primer for his current Avenue of the Arts installation, Quote.

"Conceptual art" is a term that confounds audiences who require that their art make an appearance as the proverbial painting, sculpture, photograph, print or drawing possessive of recognizable and "measurable" artistic talent, such as an expert level of craftsmanship and a trained, sensitive handling of traditional art-making materials. Wycoff often puts this audience at ease by presenting carefully rendered drawings, and competent photographs: when he does go into the conceptual deep end, with more text-based work (as with his outdoor Avenue of the Art installation), he does so with simple ideas that most people can get their heads around.

For his Avenue of the Arts project, Wycoff holds a mirror up to the current redevelopment of Kansas City's downtown that nearly ends up being big enough for the city to see itself in. Wycoff simply re-quotes a phrase etched in stone on the south façade of the 1934 Kansas City Municipal Auditorium (following the building's 75 th anniversary). His transient billboard reads in generic red text on a white background: "Commerce has made all winds her messengers. All climes her tributaries. All people her servants. Yet from the land she draws her sustenance and her strength." This exercise casts into relief the spirit gap that exists between two historic periods of growth: one that romanticized permanence and universalism - and one that romanticizes change and individualism. One thing both past and present seem to have in common is a carefully engineered sense of optimism.

Although severely lacking in the aesthetics department, Wycoff's generic billboard allows plenty of room for us to fill in our own blanks as a result of its simplicity - it is, after all, temporary, which is a large part of its message. It attempts to conceptualize the destruction and construction taking place all around it and nail down what has become a dramatically shifting context - the collective identity of a city.

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The Kansas City Star
April 28, 2005 
Page: 28 

Oh Baby You

Paragraph Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri

Mar. - Apr. 2005

All-about-me show is all about you

THERESA BEMBNISTER

Matt Wycoff makes art about Matt Wycoff.

All of the work in "Oh Baby You," Wycoff's solo exhibition at the Urban Culture Project's Paragraph gallery, could be considered self-portraiture.

The titles of his pieces are self-explanatory. For "Everyone I've ever met," the artist lists the names of every person he remembers ever meeting, in order. In Wycoff's digital print "Everywhere I've Ever Been," he takes a world map and colors the countries he's traveled to in blue to contrast the red of the countries he has yet to visit.

Although the show, understandably, could be perceived as self-centered, it's not self-indulgent. Wycoff, a 2002 graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute who just moved to New York, presents an intelligent, conceptually dazzling body of work. While making art about himself, he has his relationship with the viewer foremost in mind.

"What I hoped would happen is that all the pieces would focus as reference points, this immediate comparison setting up a relationship between myself and the viewer," Wycoff said. "I wanted people to reference themselves through my personal experiences."

For "Every Word in the English Language That I Don't Know," Wycoff flipped through the pages of a dictionary and wrote down words he didn't readily know. The words are listed in pencil on leaves of paper. Viewed from afar, the words disappear and the piece looks like a series of framed blank papers. It's difficult for viewers to keep from comparing themselves to the artist while looking at the work. During the opening, Wycoff said, people would tease him about the limits of his vocabulary.

"I had a lot of people come up and say, `You don't know this word? Everyone should know that,'" he said. "It was the kind of automatic comparison that I was hoping for."

Wycoff seeks to demonstrate that people relate to other people by forming comparisons to one another. Universal experiences can be known only through personal experiences, he argues.

"I am trying to set up a series of relationships that mimic the way people interact in the world - seeing yourself through other people and seeing other people in yourself," he said.

Wycoff shares three very personal accounts of his adolescence with viewers in the form of photographs re-creating the scenes of the loss of his virginity, his first intoxication and his expulsion from eighth grade. He spent six months tracking down the original participants and gaining permission to photograph the scenes in the original locations. It took some finagling - Wycoff's former partner had married and the principal had retired. Wycoff himself plays a small role in the photographed scenes, which are shot like movie stills. The viewer sees only part of the artist's face or body or the back of his head.

"I was trying to take myself out of it as much as possible and leave a record of my experience," he said. "I wanted to keep it simple. I didn't want it to be a journal entry."

Wycoff said a lot of art about personal experience can be cheesy. "It's too much about the maker, or that one, subjective point of view. I want to make it scientific or more straightforward so people can interact with the information directly."

In a way, the artist is strangely absent in his autobiographical work. The three photographs are the only points his own image pops up in the work. The "I's" in the titles of the other works are his only references to himself. Wycoff is calling attention to the fact that all artworks are images, thoughts, ideas and experiences filtered for the viewer through the mind of the artist.

His work is also represented in the 2005 Avenue of the Arts. The temporary outdoor art project along Central Street downtown goes on view May 7.

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University News, (University of Missouri Kansas City) 
March 24, 2005 
Culture Section  

Oh Baby You

Paragraph Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri

Mar. - Apr. 2005

'Oh Baby You" worth trip downtown

Emily Lorg

A new exhibit at Paragraph Gallery offers one artist's take on universal experience.

"Oh Baby You" features Matt Wycoff's artistic exploration of his own life and its relationship to the bigger picture.

The first piece is "Every word in the English language that I don't know" (2004), and is just that. Wycoff utilizes a full 30 frames of pencil-lined paper. Inside each box is a word he is unfamiliar with, from "aalst" to "zymurgy." Some frames are fuller than others; certain letters have a shorter list of unknown words. In these cases, the unfilled boxes mapped in pencil become just as interesting as those with words inside and provide a sense of scale prevalent throughout the exhibit.

Wycoff continues his list-making with "Everyone I've ever met"(2005), an exhaustive list of names of no importance to the viewer but which nonetheless intrigue by attesting to the number of encounters we each have. Again, Wycoff explores the universal through the personal.

Alongside these names is "Everyone whose name I know but have never met" (2005), comprising four pages of penciled names. The viewer can see the artist's train of thought by running down the list, as he runs through certain groups, such as singers, authors or athletes, and lists the names from each field. Wycoff even adds local flavor with the inclusion of news personalities Katie Horner and Bryan Busby below Michelangelo and da Vinci.

Most colorful and titillating is the triptych of coming-of-age experiences, beginning with "Re-enactment of the loss of my virginity" (2004). The scene is rather unglamorous-a girl with her shirt pulled up over her hot-pink bra, her legs clinging to those of a bare-chested man who face is unseen; a couple packs of Camels and several butts in the ashtray-but the digital print captures a sense of urgency in the half-dressed couple and their cluttered surroundings.

The second piece, "Re-enactment of my first intoxication" (2004) infuses humor into the installation. The print depicts a drunken camping trip, with a young man passed out in the foreground near a half-empty liquor bottle. His eyes are partially closed, and his red cheeks attest to the liquor consumed.

The final piece of the trio, "Re-enactment of my expulsion from eighth grade" (2004), features the drab interior of an administrator's office. The viewer looks through the perspective of a young Wycoff, only the shoulder and back of the head visible. An administrator leans over his desk doling out punishment, his fingers pressed white on the wooden desk in front of him. The man's yellow tie dominates the print, emphasizing the drabness of the school building with its cinderblock walls and standard wall clock.

Wycoff clearly has a knack for drawing on his past as fodder for a more universal vision. His work is both engaging and inviting; he airs the good, bad and ugly of his life through an open and humorous approach that will satisfy viewers.

"Oh Baby You: New Work by Matt Wycoff" is on display through May 6 at Paragraph Gallery, 23 E. 12th St. Hours are Thursday-Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. For more information call (816) 695-7734 or visit www.paragraphgallery.com.

The exhibit offered as part of the Urban Culture Project (UCP), whose mission is to transform empty downtown storefronts in the core of downtown Kansas City into dynamic new venues for visual art and performance. To this end, UCP obtains temporary no-cost leases from landlords in vacant downtown storefront spaces and finds a local artist and architect to collaborate on each space. To learn more visit www.urbancultureproject.org.