Matt Hoyt

Narrator: Sitting in the open on simple shelves, Matt Hoyt’s tiny sculptural objects seem both intimate and vulnerable. In the exhibition they’re meant only to be looked at, not touched–a fact that can make them seem inviting and withholding at the same time.

Matt Hoyt: A lot of times people, I feel, like they want to pick them up and see the other side of them. So there’s this tension that’s created if they are out in the open.

Narrator: This tension creates a sense of mystery. So does the fact that the forms themselves are unresolved. At some moments they seem like objects found in the natural world, at others, it’s more obvious that they’re products of the imagination.  Hoyt’s development of the group of objects as a whole also has a very organic quality.

Matt Hoyt: I’ll usually begin a piece by imagining something, and then I’ll try to give form to what I’m imagining, and then from there a collection of them builds up, and then the pieces start to suggest new pieces to be made. A lot of times I’ll look at one and see that something changed about it, then I’ll make it in the way that I’m imagining it changing in my mind.

I don’t like to separate studio space from living space. I like to have them around all the time, so I’m seeing them out of the corner of my eye constantly. And so they’ll be worked on for years and years, and I’ll make sometimes very subtle changes or sometimes just group them together differently, and the associations will change for me in that way.