A huge space, largely empty: Sylvia Matas
to
Gallery 1C03 515 Portage Ave, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9
Sylvia Matas, "A huge space, largely empty (detail)," 2016
digital print. Courtesy of the artist.
To complement the main exhibition Littoral Landscape in Gallery 1C03, we present a deconstructed bookwork entitled A huge space, largely empty by local interdisciplinary artist Sylvia Matas in the gallery's foyer area. This piece will be on display from March 1 - April 30, 2018.
A huge space, largely empty is a non-linear narrative of photographs, drawings, and writing that revolves around an unnamed lake. On the first page, a character picks up a stone on a night walk in the country and throws it into a lake. At the end of the book someone approaches a lake where a hole has mysteriously formed in the ice. In between those two pages there are references to sleep, dreams, insomnia, memory, and spatial disorientation.
Lakes (which can be a symbol for the unconscious mind) appear throughout the book in the written narrative and also as drawings of bathymetric maps (maps which describe lake depth). Each of the three maps appear twice in the book – once in its original orientation and once as a mirror image.
The art of Sylvia Matas focuses on the grey area between reality and perception through an exploration of how we experience our surroundings and the passage of time. Her narratives are fragmented, withholding clear distinctions of beginning and ending, and suggest moments lifted from a larger story. This feeling of incompleteness makes space for completion of the narrative in the mind of the viewer. Through recurrent motifs of landscape, memory, dreams, disorientation, and time, her work explores the act of looking at images and how the viewer constructs meaning.
Sylvia Matas works in drawing, bookworks, and video. Matas received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Manitoba and her Master of Fine Arts degree from Chelsea College of Art & Design in London, England. She has exhibited her art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Plug In ICA, Lantern (Winnipeg), the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Mercer Union (Toronto), and the Maclaren Art Centre (Barrie).