Mat Glenn: Earn Your Stripes

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Mat Glenn, "Earn Your Stripes," 2020

Earn Your Stripes is an ongoing project by Mat Glenn investigating the visual language of human-nonhuman opposition in the natural landscape. Reified by the outdoor-equipment-industrial-complex, the market inspires humans to control and conquer landscapes using a specific material language of straps, nylon, taped seams, backpacks, synthetic down, Gore-Tex, and zippers. This exhibition re-appropriates these materials to destabilize the notion that human life-force is in opposition to nature. Through this series of sculptural works, life-force and nature are enmeshed into assemblages of synthetic and organic materials, which composes our experience in the exhibition.

Earn Your Stripes creates a space where life-matter and subject-object binaries are rendered obsolete. Hybrid moments appear in this obsolescence, with life and matter vibrating between human and nonhuman references. Hybridity celebrates the unlearning of human exceptionalism by showing us that life-force is not exclusive to human bodies. Instead, it exists within these assemblages of co-existing living and non-living forces. Something like an incorporeal web connecting us to our surroundings, the work suggests that our life-force only exists insofar as it happens in our relationships to things, living and non-living. 

Earn Your Stripes is indebted to the writings of Jane Bennett, who created the conceptual space the artworks occupy, as well as the Syilx/Okanagan territory where Glenn’s understanding of the natural world was created.

Biography

Mat Glenn is a recent graduate from the University of British Columbia’s Bachelor of Fine Arts program with a major in Visual Arts and a minor in Art History. Glenn is an emerging artist working and living in the unceded Syilx/Okanagan region of British Columbia. Specializing in sculpture, installation, printmaking and digital media, his practice explores new-materialism and objecthood in the context of ecological thought. Glenn has curated exhibitions in the Okanagan including Chasten My Fantasies of Human Mastery at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art. This year he exhibited Fear Frequency at the Vernon Public Art Gallery, and the two-person exhibition Creative Growth Centre for Spiritual Nourishment at the Kelowna Art Gallery with Lucas Glenn.

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