Matthew Woodward was born in Rochester New York in 1981. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005 and the New York Academy of Art in 2007. He is best known for his works that overlap identities of the American City through the rusting and broken ornament of a ubiquitous architectural heritage. 

 

The award-winning artist has exhibited his works in renowned art galleries around the United States and Europe, including The Elmhurst Museum of Art, Linda Warren Gallery and New York Academy of Art, to name just a few. From July 23 through August 22, 2021, CITISPIRE Tiemann is giving Manhattan’s local and international audience a chance to enjoy his exhibition entitled “Friction Fit,” and take part in a series of masterclasses that relate to the exhibition. 

 

The official opening of “Friction Fit” will take place on July 23 from17.00 - 20.00 at CITISPIRE Tiemann (45 Tiemann Place, Storefront NYC). The event is open to the public and will feature an artist meet-and-greet, as well as a walkthrough tour of the gallery led by the artist himself. 

THE EXHIBITION​

​

Friction Fit refers to the unique hanging system devised for the show: throughout the gallery a series of structural beams are pressured into place, providing a supportive platform upon which each work is suspended.

 

This is an inconspicuous reference to the works themselves: collages of found-paper (Woodward refers to them as studies in composition and color) picked off the street and collected over years of walking the city; and drawings of architectural ornament once designed to articulate internal pressures and themes circulating throughout a given structure. In a way, both the collage and drawings are their own version of old lives, old understandings reconsidered to fit into a new context.

 

Here Woodward re-homes them through a multitude of materials, reactivates them, and calls attention to that other world of pressures and frictions that live on just beneath the surface of what we see. A world of presents and associations, tethered to our senses of ourselves, eerily familiar yet removed, suspended, not quite enclosing and thereby not quite capturing the real. Instead, something new is collected out of the wake of memory. 

​

 In addition to featuring visual works of art, “FRICTION FIT” is given a musical  dimension  by the Iceland – based composer Leeni Laasfeld (better known under the pseudonym Possimiste)  who has created an original soundscape inspired by the featured works of Woodward.