Matthew Offenbacher

Pandemonium
Thursday, April 30, 2015, 7:00 – 8:00 pm

The internet has become the primary place to seek out art information. If the fin de siècle editors of Pan were beamed to the future, would they find the web a triumph of their effort to create a technologically sophisticated network of international arts communication? Or would they be horrified by the vast, churning database of fan fiction, exhibition aggregators, museum collections, and funny cat videos? Join Seattle artist and publisher, Matthew Offenbacher, Neal Fryett, Jason Hirata, and Mystical Orchid, as they perform an experimental art dive into the web.

This was an experimental performance/panel I organized for The Frye Art Museum’s exhibition Pan: A Graphic Arts Time Capsule of Europe 1895-1900.

By Julie Alexander, Nicholas Nyland and Matthew Offenbacher, and including work by Katrin Bremermann, Maria Britton, Dawn Cerny, Terry Green, Margie Livingston and Mathieu Wernert.

SOIL Gallery, Seattle, February 5 - February 28, 2015

“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.” —Oscar Wilde’s reputed last words

photos by Nicholas Nyland

read Erin Langner’s review

During a 2014 bicycle tour in Western Europe, Whitney Ford-Terry collected notes, maps, tickets, pamphlets and other ephemera which she mailed to correspondents in Seattle, asking us to interpret them in some way. The results were posted on a website and were to be published in a book that never got made. Other correspondents included Molly Mac, Anastasia Hill, Alex Kostelnik, Tessa Hulls, Matt Hilger and Robert Mittenthal.

See my contribution

Organized by the The New Foundation Seattle

untitled
tempera and acrylic paint on concrete
7.5' circumference x 13' high

Site-specific painting for the Cornish College Gallery, Seattle

September–October 2013

The Neddy at Cornish is a $25,000 unrestricted award in memory of Ned Behnke. It is awarded annually to two artists from the Puget Sound region. The 2013 recipients were Matthew Offenbacher and Victoria Haven. The exhibition also featured finalists Julie Alpert, Jack Daws, Emily Gherard, Andrea Heimer, Dan Webb and Robert Yoder.

What makes an intellectual? What is the basis of property? What is the relationship between the life of the mind and the sensual world?

Organized with Yoko Ott for the Hedreen Gallery, Seattle University. Including work by PJ Alaimo, Ken Allan, Cris Bruch, John Carter, Richard Gray, Wynne Greenwood, Mandy Greer, Heide Hinrichs, Robin Held, Isaac Layman, Susie J. Lee, Christine Luscombe, Philip Miner, Saya Moriyasu, Emily Pothast, Philip Thurtle, Charles Tung, Ben Waterman, Dan Webb, Lindsay Whitlow, Greg Wilson, Kathleen Woodward, Jason Wirth and Claude Zervas.

Collaboration with Deb Baxter and Margot Quan Knight for The Gift Shop. Installation view at the Henry Art Gallery. The sink came from a women’s bathroom in an old South Seattle factory building owned by the U.S. General Services Administration. Deb had her studio there along with about forty other artists. For ten years, space had been inexpensively leased to artists, thanks to an unusual arrangement made by an art-loving federal administrator. Deb, Margot and I “requisitioned” the sink on the evening before the building was closed and demolished for redevelopment. We removed the foot pedal and hid a pump in the base so that it took the form of a continuously flowing fountain. We made a decorative floor for it, using industrial tiles to form a quilt pattern sent to us by Deb’s mom.

“It has always been a place of abundance. Long before the arrival of European settlers, the area's resources allowed indigenous peoples to develop uncommonly rich artistic traditions. Once settlers arrived, these same resources—timber, fish, rich land—enabled economic prosperity.” (Alaska Airlines Inflight Magazine, October 2007)

We have coined the name ‘second peoples’ to describe the people who arrive late on the scene, after the beginning, after the abundance, after the traumatic event, after everything’s been said and done, after, even, the end. We are the second peoples. Chances are, you are too.

This is an exhibition dealing with what it means to be second. We inhabit a landscape of iteration, reverb, elision, and generational noise. Our corner of North America—these mountains, that timber, this rich land—belonged to someone else. Our popular culture—those TV shows, that movie sequel, this new band that is so retro they’re cool—belonged to some other time. Our art is that way, too: this gesture to Donald Judd, that nod to Philip Guston, that Eva Hesse wink.

We are interested in locating the coordinates of this second position. How did we end up here? What is our responsibility for what happened before us? What is our responsibility for the things that happen now in our names? Like Simone de Beauvoir argues in “Second Sex”, we think we should be free to transcend ourselves as subjects, to not be confined to existential leftovers.

Contemporary art is concerned with this alchemy, trying to turn second-handedness into first-handedness, reversing the flow of energy, presenting not representing, creating value from valuelessness. We think this is a worthwhile activity. We also think it is a fraught activity. The work in this exhibition exposes some of the fractures created by this ceaseless turning, and also dreams of a third position, a reification of our desire to escape, a momentary place to stop.

A Special Project for Bard Hall

The work in this show asks simple questions about color, line and pattern. For instance, what if the relationship between foreground and background were inverted? What would it look like to fix the shape of the sky, seen through the windows, from a single point in the room? What if you focused on the mortar rather than the bricks? The shape of the wall hangings are based on how the ocean looks between houses, fences, cars and other things that get in the way of a view. How does a broken pattern suggest the part that is missing? These questions involve paying attention to visual boundaries. I hope posing them here, in the community hall of a church, suggests thinking in a metaphorical way about other sorts of boundaries.

Light show, polyester color filters, 2004
Fabric wall drawings, fabric and thread, 2002
Skyline, acylic paint on static cling vinyl, 2003-4
Net, nylon rope and metal brackets, 2004