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J. Matthew Thomas

'geobiology'

MoMo Santa Fe
143 Lincoln Ave, Santa Fe, NM
Fall 2024 Solo Exhibition
Opening: Friday, September 27, 2024



J. Matthew Thomas

Geobiology: studies of how life and place interact and co-evolve

Geobiology: studies of how life and place interact and co-evolve
 

Growing up, my mother would outfit our family with clothing made in the sewing room located within the family home. Geobiology is a series of cut, sewn, and distressed vintage Simplicity and McCalls clothing patterns handed-down to me from my mother. Those homemade outfits were second skins that protected us and created a sense of identity, and while fashioned from commercial patterns, were customized and adorned, and always lovingly crafted. The materials are a life-time in collecting, foraged from my family home and reassembled, constructed (and deconstructed) with the tools of construction all from my background in architecture. 

 

This series of wallhanging constructions are a meditation on process, materials and identity. The work is a look at queering the perceptions of ‘women’s work’ with alternative perspectives of gendered labor, craft, and production. The work is hand crafted with my small Kenmore sewing machine, bobbins of thread, a radial sander, acrylic paint, and finished with a construction grade Linseed and Tung hardening oil. The work is gently worn, the patterns not perfect, the stitching coming apart.  The work expresses a tension between safety and risk, protection and woundedness.

 

Arousing a sense of vulnerability - of one’s skin, of wounding, of bandaging - The work speaks to questions of nurturing: in how we craft it, instruct it, or protect it.  Through the manipulation of materials, the work becomes a second skin, seen as maps or geographies of one’s own inner landscape, roadmaps of broken systems and fragmented patterns. They present different ways one may have traversed life, navigated growth, and began a process of healing.

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