Film by Eric Minh Swenson.
Matt Hope arrived in Beijing, China at the end of 2007. He has since spent his time exploring and fabricating, immersing himself in the sprawling material and component markets, treating them as a personal form of a vast color palette, tool box, and construction set. This collection of store fronts and informal fabrication areas, where Hope gathered his inspiration, materials, and equipment for his series’
Tools and Towers, is called Sun Dragon Hardware. Hope’s native London is where the remains of any industry have all but vanished. Starved of visual stimulation he relocated to the other side of the world, riding the wake of industrial relocation. The abundance of cheap materials and a stark new environment along with the instantaneous availability to raw materials and fabrication was the impetus for his works Tools and Towers. Hope explains that, “The Sun Dragon Hardware Market, with its dusty labyrinths and unregulated practices, is a nightmare for most.” However, he continues, to be attracted to the immediacy of it stating that, “there is a virtue in its no frills character. A spooky luster emanates from its lack of heritage, its booming hyperbolic ego to sprawl, consume and replicate.” Rather than purchasing all his equipment, Hope often makes custom devices, fabricating what cannot be bought. A visit to his studio, where it is difficult to distinguish between, sculpture, machine, or tool, is testament to this ambiguity. Hope’s practice plays with and proceeds to dismantle functionality, a key tenant in his work.
The Tools series fits squarely within the post minimalist tradition. The seamless blended surfaces capture the eye; they are metallic but abstain reflection. More importantly the sculptures are solid, hard, and weighty, appearing to be carved
with ease, as if from a block of soft wood. The forms are somewhat idealized, evoking faded relics of the contents of a distant garden shed, workers locker, or vacated construction site. However these “tools” defy all logic. Hope has made, for
example, a sledgehammer and a pickaxe, both of which the head and handle are hewn from the same steel billet, in turn rendering the tools unusable. With the blending of head and body a subtle disruption occurs, the pendulum like action
that gives them their swing is nullified. These surfaces are highly worked and everything looks to be in working order, but are forbidden to touch.
The Towers series consists of ten sculptures built from Chinese-made hardware: switches, motors, and structural elements. These skeletal frames serve as chassis to which components are attached that perform a variety of bizarre functions, kinetic,sonic, or other. At first glance the forms echo the totemics of Brancusi, the kinetics of Tinguely, while others lean more toward the bygone appendages of science fiction, such as Kubrick’s Space Odyssey Discovery ship and other less acclaimedtitles. Other works bare the scars of Brutalist architecture of the 1960s, air traffic control, and cold war silence, however, these Towers emit noise. All exceeding the height of a person, these sculptures’ raw unpainted innards are comprised of crude studding, angle iron, and mending plates. These sculptures employ identical construction methods to the prosaic towers of the man-made environment which reside outside and help guide us: i.e. radio masts, phone towers, pylons, etc.
Matt Hope was born in 1976 in London and currently lives and works in Caochangdi, an arts disctrict in Beijing, China. He studied at Chelsea School of Art, London from 1994-96. Hope received his BFA at the Winchester School of Art, Hamphsire, U.K. in 1999, and earned his MFA at University of California, San Diego in 2004. He is known for elaborate kinetic art and sound art constructions that utilize the large-scale fabrication factories in Mainland China.
For more info on Eric Minh Swenson visit his website at thuvanarts.com. His art films can be seen at thuvanarts.com/take1
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