James Nicholson
547 West 27th Street, 2nd Floor, 212-967-5700
Chelsea
April 6 - May 6, 2006
Web Site
Amanda Mathis creates installations that straddle the line between art and architecture, altering the viewer’s experience of a space. Using common building materials such as sheetrock and steel studs, Mathis meticulously recreates a large section of a room – a wall, a doorway, a corner – and places it within the room in unexpected ways.
In her installation at the gallery Mathis will create a full-scale facsimile of a 30-foot section of the gallery’s east wall – complete with the doorway, base molding, built-in light, and odd corners of the original. The new wall will be placed in the center of the gallery and cantilevered at an angle to create the illusion that the wall is both falling away from the viewer and descending into the gallery¹s floor.
By copying an immediately recognizable element of a room, and then radically altering it, Mathis¹s work forces viewers to re-examine their relationship with their everyday surroundings. Working on a cerebral as well as a physical level, Mathis¹s installations place the viewer in an uneasy environment that is at once familiar and profoundly disorienting. In doing so, Mathis draws our attention to the subtleties of our surroundings and heightens our awareness of the structures that encompass us.