9/4/2004
Matthew Ritchie
Mass MoCA, North Adams
The first major museum exhibition of this multimedia artist's work organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Ritchie's complex and imaginary story of the history of the universe is told through monumental wall drawings, expansive sculptural installations, and beautiful digital animations.
April 10, 2004, through Spring 2005
Opening April 10, 2004, MASS MoCA presents Matthew
Ritchie: Proposition Player, the first major museum exhibition of this
multimedia artist's work organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Featuring an installation of new works by Ritchie, the exhibition includes
enormous new pieces dramatically suited to MASS MoCA's soaring Tall Gallery on
the first floor as well as a selection of painting, drawings, and light boxes,
which Ritchie is well-known for. Ritchie's complex and imaginary story of the
history of the universe is told through monumental wall drawings, expansive
sculptural installations, and beautiful digital animations. "Matthew plies the
full spectrum," said Joseph Thompson, Director of MASS MoCA, "his project is
immense in scale, and yet intricately detailed, vast in theme and yet sharply
and consistently rendered, insisting on certain forms of logic, lithe as they
may be."
Matthew Ritchie explores a self-created cosmological system through his work -
an endless and complex landscape where various ideas and concepts can coexist.
He draws upon a vocabulary of scientific notations, cartoon characters,
mythology, biblical tales and pulp fiction to illustrate the workings of his
alternate universe. At the core of Ritchie's art is "information," a sort of
raw material from which all of his work evolves, as it is mapped and diagrammed
through his own systems of color, line, paint, metal and light. Through
Ritchie's sweeping and incredibly detailed creations, viewers are engaged in his
metaphorical search to determine man's place in the cosmos.
Ritchie's works The Fast Set, a light box, and Stacked, a large complex drawing,
that are both diagrammatic illustrations for his evolving, intricately wrought
narrative about the Big Bang and the origins of the universe, were exhibited at
MASS MoCA as part of Unnatural Science in 2000.
Matthew Ritchie: Proposition Player is the most ambitious installment to date in
the artist's ongoing narrative, and with it his work has reached a pivotal point
where his version of the evolution of the universe is now laid out in its
entirety. As such, it has taken on a new life and revealed itself to be as much
a game as a story. The large spaces available at MASS MoCA - and Contemporary
Arts Museum Houston which organized the exhibition and presented it in a
slightly different form  enabled Ritchie to think and work on a grander scale
than had heretofore been possible.
Among the most remarkable works is the one that lends its name to the
exhibition, Proposition Player (2003), a unique game in which viewers throw dice
on an interactive digital craps table to determine the history of the universe.
As the game is played, animations are projected onto the table and a screen
positioned on an adjacent wall. Throughout the game, various adjacent
sculptural works are highlighted and visually referenced, depending on the
choices made by the player. These sculptural works include The God Impersonator
(2003), an enormous rubber floor mosaic that allows viewers to walk into the
heart of the piece and a deck of cards featuring Ritchie's cast of characters;
The Fine Constant (2003), a one-hundred foot long, map of the universe that
literally comes off the wall winding around the viewer; and new characters in
the form of sculpted heads which have been created by the artist in
collaboration with schoolchildren.
Matthew Ritchie was born in 1964 in London, England. He attended Boston
University in 1982 and received his B.F.A. from the Camberwell School of Art,
London, in 1986. He has had recent solo exhibitions at c/o Atle Gerhardsen,
Berlin (2003); Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2002); White Cube, London; and
the Dallas Museum of Art (2001). His work has been included in group
exhibitions such as (The World May Be) Fantastic, Biennale of Sydney, Australia
(2002); Sprawl, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2002); Urgent
Painting, LARC/Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris (2002) and Drawing Now: Eight
Propositions, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA QNS), New York (2002). Ritchie lives
and works in New York City.
Matthew Ritchie: Proposition Player is accompanied by a 136-page
fully-illustrated catalogue published by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in
association with Hatje Cantz Publishers, Germany. It contains essays by MASS
MoCA Curator Laura Steward Heon; Lynn Herbert, senior curator at Contemporary
Arts Museum Houston, and Jennelle Porter, an independent curator and writer.
The catalogue also includes an interview with the artist by writer Thyrza
Nichols Goodeve, a checklist of the exhibition and documentation on the artist's
career.
Proposition Player at MASS MoCA is made possible in part by the generous support
of the National Endowment for the Arts and Holly Angell Hardman. Ritchie's work
God Impersonator is in collaboration with Fabric Workshop.
MASS MoCA is the country's largest center for contemporary visual and performing
arts and is located in North Adams, Massachusetts, on a restored 19th-century
factory campus. MASS MoCA's galleries are open 11 - 5 every day except Tuesdays.
Gallery admission is $9 for adults, $3 for children 6 - 16, and free for
children under 6. Members admitted free year-round. For additional information,
call 413 662 2111 or visit www.massmoca.org.
MassMoCA
87 Marshall Street, North Adams
tel 413 6644481