TOLEDO, OH (NWPR) – On view through April 2, 2023 at the Toledo Museum of Art, “Matt Wedel: Phenomenal Debris” is an exhibition that brings together a large selection of the artist’s ceramics and drawings spanning over a decade of his career, who is renowned in his field for pushing the boundaries of ceramics, resulting in objects that recall familiar forms while also springing from his own imagination.
Taken from the artist’s profile page, he wrote “…My practice is a philosophical conversations with myself while acting on these ideas. It is not really about sculpture but about a dialog surrounding the evolutionary function of dreams, projected images and the ability to depict them. In its own way, it is a type of realism…a type of creation that attempts to eliminate the conditions which disrupt the act of looking…to find knowledge in the visions that populate our minds. What do we do with those visions? The creation of them is the attempt at declaring them as self and as a form of presence, i.e. the image is present on the floor or the image is present on the wall.”
With experimentation playing a pivotal role, he challenges himself to embrace chance, possibility and failure, but his practice is well-grounded in the exploration of human psychology. The resulting works are a story of creation and destruction.
The exhibition marks the first large-scale solo show for the artist in a major art museum. More on Matt at www.mattwedel.com and via this YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfvw1AX0-5g in his studio in Athens, Ohio in January 2013 as he works toward his solo exhibition, “Matt Wedel: Sheep’s Head” that was on view at L.A. Louver, an art gallery focusing on American and European contemporary art, located in Venice, California.