Lee Materazzi | DIY: Quint Contemporary Art: 7547 Girard Avenue
Quint Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of LEE MATERAZZI: DIY, which will feature work from Materazzi’s new photographic series and a special installation. This is the first solo exhibition for Materazzi at Quint Gallery. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, September 13th from 6-8pm, is open to the public, and the artist will be in attendance.
"And then, in his painful torment, I saw Sisyphus striving with both hands to raise a massive rock. He'd brace his arms and feet, then strain to push it uphill to the top. But just as he was going to get that stone across the crest, its overpowering weight would make it change direction. The cruel rock would roll back down again onto the plain. Then he'd strain once more to push it up the slope. His limbs dripped sweat, and dust rose from his head.” - Homer, The Odyssey 770 (Translation by Ian Johnston)
Like any Sisyphean task, one feels as though they can reach the top until their stone tumbles back down the hill. In DIY, Materazzi plays with futility, similar to Sisyphus with his boulder. She constructs a field of flowers simply to take it apart once the last flower has been placed. Woven into her work are the practicalities and impracticalities of making artwork with a toddler in a garage. The photographs attribute their beauty to their subject matter, and they embrace the same fate as Sisyphus; the point being the need to move forward rather than to arrive at a particular destination.
Materazzi’s works in her garage have ironic parallels to land art (appropriately indoors) and “mountain moving” (metaphorically). In the poetic statement for the series, Materazzi says:
Francis Alÿs,
Moving Mountains,
just an inch
or two
Michael Heizer,
north east south west,
What would it take for me,
to dig a hole that deep?
In the artworks, which Materazzi typically creates without the assistance of Photoshop, she contorts and affronts her body to create moving tributes to space. The artworks are like performances, echoing the work of Charles Ray and Vito Acconci. In this series, the newest additions to the performance are her daughter and her garage (the chosen space for this entire body of work). What comes through is a raw DIY approach not only to making art but also of being a new mother. The space acts as its own embodiment, and she dresses it with antiques, bouncy balls, scribble drawings, furniture and dirty footprints. The exhibition will also feature an installation of one wall extracted from Materazzi’s garage, the remnant of a performance used in the series of photographs.
Materazzi received her degree from Central St. Martins in London where she studied sculpture. Materazzi’s work has been shown in several group and solo presentations in the United States and Europe. The work is featured in numerous private and museum collections including the Margulies Collection, the Cisneros Collection and the Perez Art Museum. Materazzi is originally from Miami and currently lives and works in San Francisco.
