Mad Art Gallery: Friday, 25 April 2008

Matty Kleinberg MFA thesis exhibition: Reflections of a Private Public. This exhibition will run from Friday, April 25, 2008, through Thursday, May 1, 2008. Opening reception on Friday, April 25, 2008, from 7:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m.

Matty Kleinberg's work utilizes reflections of once functioning urban spaces to transform the gallery into a surrogate public plaza. In this setting, large-scale woodcuts set a pace and rhythm that invoke banks of windows, a collective reflected image of a publicly accessible area. Layers of imagery meld together into one conglomerate view, branches of trees intertwine with reflections of experienced housing and the memory of abandonment amid vitality. Leaves and brick become lost in one another. Centered among these reflections is the subject matter from which imagery bounces back and forth is an immense quilt that depicts the gridded street layout of Old North St. Louis and color-codes the area's viability. Throughout the exhibition, the gallery serves as surrogate public square, and the gallery viewers become the visitors and residents of this newly created neighborhood area. In this way, a supposedly unusable, forgotten area is reactivated.