Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Matt Erickson
American; 21st-century
Bloomington, IL: Cometogetherspace
71%
I Have Communication Problems; Hear My Mind. 2012. Graphite and found objects on found board
Matt's a friend so my appraisal could be impure, but I see in this piece an impressive commingling of clear-eyed attempts at meaning-making with something like its opposite, deliberate opacity and obfuscation. (Rauschenberg isn't far off.) Take that Japanese-garden torii form in the middle of the composition, with just a little bit of foreground implied by the shading in front of it. It does the job of suggesting a sort of illusionistic space, but it also seems to exist barely one single mark away from pure abstractness. Ditto the photographs, but through different means: as photos, they're clearly indices of things in the world, but what each one of them depicts is obscured in one way or another, and their position within the pictorial field which the drawn elements imply is not evident or even entirely possible to determine. There are, for sure, some moments of strained symbolism and unresolved arrangement — the title could've left more to the imagination; a few fewer assemblage components might've made the really crucial ones, like that votive fixture holding the rose, pop a bit more than they do — but these weaknesses shrink beside the overall coherence of the work. There's a real clarity to it, but it's a clarity that's achieved through, about, confusion. (TFS, 2025)