“Long Gong Sing Song,” Matt Christy
A little more than 12 years ago, I got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. At times I thought the program’s philosophy was absurd. I prayed with clenched teeth and cringed at AA’s paternalistic god. But I went to meetings because I was dying, and I don’t fully understand why I kept going back once I was well. I still carry that early feeling with me — despair, isolation — but it’s rarely at the front of my mind.
I felt that familiar feeling acutely when viewing The Red Arrow Gallery’s current exhibition of local artist Matt Christy’s collaged paintings. The Vibrating Neighbor is full of energetic, abstract fields of color. In one painting, disembodied hands are oriented in all directions, like they’re reaching for one another, some positioned to shake hands. In the exhibition’s 7-foot-tall showstopper, “Untitled (Tiger),” a tiger rears back atop a teardrop-shaped field of molecules, ready to pounce.
“On The Occasion Of A Not Knowing And Never Remembered,” Matt Christy
The show is trippy and unpretentious. There’s a lot of humor in The Vibrating Neighbor — think Richard Brautigan — and this might be due to Christy’s personal philosophy. He’s not the type of artist who takes himself too seriously, but that’s not to say he doesn’t have a clear and original voice capable of eliciting an emotional response from viewers.
The larger paintings in the show have a pulsating presence, but what’s even more striking is the sound they suggest. In my favorite of these, “On The Occasion Of A Not Knowing And Never Remembered,” a snapshot of a teenage boy is affixed to a black field of undulating rays. The boy cups his hands to his mouth and shouts. White lines radiate from a central figure, like a darkened stained-glass-window portrait of Christ — only the central figure is an ant. The boy appears again in “Long Gong Sing Song,” but smaller, off to the edge of the painting in a half-moon. One of Christy’s medium-size paintings, “Ant Song,” shows wavy lines carrying an ant from one tunnel to the other. “Exploding Unfolding Gasp Gasp” has a pair of shoes hurtling out from a center point in a red concentric field, as if some half-dressed Star Trek character got transported too soon. As a whole, the show evokes the underlying rhythms of experimental noise music, growing louder and louder until it’s almost unbearable — but then it stops, and a sweet melody soothes the ears.
When Christy and I speak, he’s been reading essays about drawing by the great critic John Berger. Later I check out Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook from the library in an attempt to get closer to The Vibrating Neighbor — to feel it move. In one untitled essay, Berger describes drawing irises growing against the wall of his house. He tries to perceive the energy that’s radiating from them. “How do they react with the air around them,” he asks, “with the sunshine, with the warmth reflected off the wall of the house?” To Christy, these relationships are enigmatic, impossible, he says, to account for. He smiles. “Maybe it’s good for an artist to want to do an impossible thing,” he says. Christy is not afraid of failing — although he doesn’t, not by a longshot.
"Untitled (Tiger)," Matt Christy
He is multifaceted. His 2017 Seed Space show, They Were All Talking At The Same Time So I Grew More Ears, was a rambling narrative of weird drawings and zany animated short films about a disconcerted angel. And he’s writing a novel — “a sprawling mess of a story,” he says, that probably won’t be complete for another 10 years. Christy is an artist who is perpetually curious, seeking the sublime even as he doubts its existence.
That brings us to drugs. Hallucinogens, Christy says, disrupt the supposition that we know everything. Questions lead only to more questions. Despite how bungling those questions might be to the sober observer, Christy says the hallucinatory quest is motivating and hopeful. This feeling is apparent in The Vibrating Neighbor, and it’s made more complicated — and more interesting — by the show’s other theme: religion.
Religion, Christy tells me, is where you jump from to understand the world. People land at all sorts of points along the spectrum of religion and spirituality. Maybe, like me, you’re content not to know. But even that belief — I can’t know, there is no knowing — is a certainty itself. The figures in Christy’s paintings have a sorrow to them. They’re alienated from each other, yet they’re still so near. Besides the shouting boy, another figure appears twice — an old man. Everything about him suggests strain: his tidy but faded blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the muscles in his forearms and the tension in his neck as he looks up at something. The expression on his face is one of agony or ecstasy. Both occupy the same space in so much of Christy’s work.
After I left the gallery and crept through an unreasonable amount of traffic, it came to me. The way I felt in the presence of Christy’s paintings is the same reason I kept going back to AA: to hold hands with strangers — many of whom were feeling acute pain and isolation — and fend off despair.
