Meat Market Gallery

Matt Ravenstahl’s work comes off on your hands. The residue is often graphite and the raw material is the constant inundation we all experience of social and political spectacle. It is presented as communication but the barrage of information more closely resembles a white noise that insinuates itself into our psyches as affect. In his multimedia installation work, MR searches for the exit. His hoped-for getaway car – impulse. To escape affect, those assumptions that infect our insides by means of cultural osmosis and take up residence masquerading as innate emotion, Ravenstahl investigates and embraces impulse as a way to go beyond false communication.

Experimentation and process are at the center of Matt Ravenstahl’s work. He reinterprets the nature and meaning of the initial impulse to stimuli and creates sculptural objects and performances that present relationships extrapolated from simple verbs or actions: burn, cook, kiss. As these impulses take on visual form, he introduces a variety of materials to transform the vocabulary, each choice dictated by the original reaction to the social and political context.

The result is a series of videos and sculptural works exploring the depths behind surface interaction. From his video and drawn residues, “Lipstick Performance”,” in which the artist covers himself with graphite and flings himself against blank paper affixed to the gallery wall, to the slippery, graphite coated casts of heads, mouths bound and closed, that emerge from the gallery floor, Ravenstahl shows us the ways in which communication between people, or with oneself, has become impossible, coated, bound, mute. In his large video installation, “Suspension”, he turns the social pressures and prescriptions that distort the ways we think about our bodies into a physics experiment, complete with hooks, chains, and rope. In this exhibition, Ravenstahl explores the ways in which we can, through an understanding of the way impulse tells us how we might really feel or how we might really like to act, bite the wrong end of the consumerist.

“Suspension” is an attempt to manifest the internal reality into physical experience. Poetry of body, mind and action. The repetition makes reference to the circular nature of our human behaviors.