SPAMFV: Wood, steel, mud tires, plastics 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
hpgrp GALLERY NY is pleased to announce the opening of "4 "by Nao Matsumoto
April 4—May 12, 2012
hpgrp GALLERY NY: 529 West 20th St. New York NY10011 Tel: 212 727 2491
Opening Hours: Tue-Sat 11am - 6pm
March 23, 2012—hpgrp GALLERY NY is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by New Yorkbased artist Nao Matsumoto. Consisting of four mixed media sculptures made in the past year, the
show is a continuation of themes that Matsumoto has been working on for most of his career. In them,
he explores the natural world, and makes work that depicts the duality and the irony of his
observations.
In Chainsaw Blue, Matsumoto created a fiber re-enforced plastic sculpture of a Sawfish, a creature with
a jagged sword-like snout. In the work, this appendage is replaced by an actual chainsaw, which both
mimics the natural shape of the fish, as well as makes a play on its name. Matsumoto, who has always
been fascinated by animals that have illogical phenotypes, painted the work sky blue and white, to
counterbalance the fear evoked by the menacing creature. Coupled with the pun on its name,
Matsumoto’s sawfish is marked by his characteristic wit and interest in latent violence, the boiling
tension that pervades much of his work.
In You/Me, Matsumoto attaches approximately 40,000 screws on wooden baseboards to spell out the
words “You” and “Me,” a pun on the phrase “Screw you, Screw me.” The resulting effect—the letters
look like they are made out of swarms of wasps congregated on honeycombs—lends the work an
organic texture despite the fact that it’s made out of industrial materials. Requiring what Matsumoto
describes as “intensely mundane labor,” the piece exudes a latent element of violence not only
through its message, but also because of the frustration and boredom the artist felt when he was drilling
each screw into the letters.
In 100, one-hundred individually cast resin ant heads are mounted on the wall in a precise, square grid.
The installation—a continuation of Matsumoto’s earlier work, in which he associates insect heads with
numbers—compares the systematic nature of the decimal system with the efficiency of the social
structure of ants. For the artist, the number 100 signals a certain aesthetic completeness, and affords
him the opportunity to observe synchronicities with events that occur in his own life.
In SAMF-V, Matsumoto created a vehicle out of mud tires mounted on a steel frame, with long, vicious
wooden spikes pointing horizontally in both directions. Reminiscent of something a character would
drive in the post-apocalyptic film Mad Max, the work channels both primitive violence and industrial
strength. Inspired in part by the wood carvings of the Makonde tribe, which Matsumoto saw when he
was living in Tanzania, as well as gargoyles and the wooden stakes hypothetically used to kill vampires,
the work serves as a kind of demonic form, to ward off evil spirits. Using both modern and primitive
materials the vehicle is at once intimidating and enticing, as is any other kind of lethal weaponry.
About The Artist
Nao Matsumoto is a sculptor and custom woodworker who lives and works in Brooklyn. Matsumoto
received his BS in biology and BA in studio art from Pitzer College in 1995, and then went on to receive
his MFA in sculpture from the Pratt Institute in 1999. Since then, his work has been shown in exhibitions at
venues such as Whitebox Gallery, Hamiltonian Gallery, hpgrp Gallery, the Bronx Council of the Arts, the
Pulse Art Fair in New York, and Scope Miami. His work has been reviewed in the Washington Post, The
Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Interior Design Magazine, and Time Out New York, to name a
few. Matsumoto also delivers lectures, and serves as a visiting professor at Pratt.