like a portal, like a window, like a moment
like a portal, like a window, like a moment
Between Pheasants Contemporary
Curated and essay by Alexander Rondeau
Tyler Matheson’s solo exhibition like a portal, like a window, like a moment, is, as the title suggests, a series of small queer openings. Matheson’s work is much indebted to queer scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s generous writings on queer aesthetics rooted in glimmer and iridescence as building queer momentum.[1] For example, in Matheson’s series Oblivion, iridescent rainbow fibres emerge as a backdrop encased in cement like a dandelion growing through sidewalk cracks; there is a clear, queer disjuncture yet nonetheless distinct potential for manifestation through these interstitial cracks of possibility. Prior to being installed in the coop, Matheson’s works were documented in the gallery’s surroundings in contexts that much resemble the assigned usages of the materials he is working with. Perhaps most importantly, Matheson’s works point towards a queerness that is in fact already somehow loosely always present, unfolding and opening through glimmering portals.
A key tenant throughout Matheson’s overall practice is a close attention to (dis)orientations in viewer-artwork relational dynamics. Often offering glimmering iridescent planes, Matheson’s pieces create undulating wavelengths that produce a variety of — admittedly, very gay — rainbows that follow the viewer’s wandering eye. As you move around each piece, the artworks open themselves continuously lending new, varying levels of visibility. This relational importance on (dis)orientation is analogous with queer feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s writings on queer orientation as a phenomenological directionality; to Ahmed, and too to Matheson, a queer (dis)orientation is not a sexual drive, rather it is an impulse that propels queer bodies towards —and simultaneously, away — from other bodies, places, spaces, objects, communities, and so on.[2] like a portal, like a window, like a moment thus produces small queer openings precisely through these (dis)orienting encounters.
Ultimately, this is an exhibition on queer theory: in the same way that Ahmed writes on queer disorientation, Matheson’s work is a perfect example of how contemporary art also disorients us by offering ways to look, pivot, look anew, question, and eventually making the realm of the theoretical visible. Too, like Muñoz, Matheson ushers us — quite literally — to find queer momentum made manifest by the the entrancing iridescent artworks that subconsciously prompt us to dance around the coop.
[1] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, (New York City, New York University Press, 2009), 1
[2] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, (Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2006), 56