Matt Browning, Overview

Matt Browning: My name is Matt Browning. I'm an artist based in Seattle, Washington.

In the show are a number of carvings that hang on the wall. These are carvings that are each produced from a single block of wood, and they are cut in such a way and carved in such a way that they then unfold into a bounded grid of interlocking chain links that is then hung upon the wall.

The work itself began as a challenge, whether or not I could take a piece of wood or any material really, and, through a series of selective cuts, expand that material, spatially and volumetrically, in a way that never actually separates the material from itself.

The grid has always been, or can be, a sort of symbol of a certain type of infrastructural state craft, industrial modes of production, assembly lines, factories, whatever. Whereas flexibility, either the flexibility of, say, cloth or the flexibility of the chain links in these carvings, can be seen as symbols of, or metaphors for, a certain type of flexible precariousness that workers have always been asked to take upon themselves, rather than by those who control the means of production.