Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 5 and 6

Born 1984 in Redmond, WA
Lives in Seattle, WA

For Matt Browning, crafts such as weaving, stitching, and whittling represent a kind of labor that is often disregarded in art. In his works, he investigates both materiality and the potential reconciliation of traditional craft practices with modernist abstraction. By using folk techniques to create common manufactured forms, Browning brings traces of his hand to structures associated with Minimal and Conceptual art. For the Biennial, Browning created a series of grids. Although they look alike, they are not mass-produced: to make each one, the artist hand-carved a single block of wood into interlocking sections, responding to traditional whittled forms that mimic the links of a chain.