Double Grammar Zone
Double Grammar Zone
Matt Henry
PHOTO OP.
Skar Image Lab
1 New Bond Street, Kingsland, Auckland
4 June – 2 July 2022
Opening celebration Friday 3 June, 5-7pm
Open Saturdays 11am - 2pm
Part of the Auckland Festival of Photography
Reviewed by John Hurrell for EyeContact, June 2022
Matt Henry’s Double Grammar Zone borrows a real estate marketing term that promotes residential properties within the prestigious zoning catchments of Auckland Grammar and Epsom Girls’ Grammar schools. In this exhibition, the phrase also refers to language, the real estate and art markets, and the visual grammar of abstraction and advertising.
Redacted real estate signs photographed in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington are printed on the same plastic corflute material as the objects they depict – an analogous play between the fields of housing, finance, design and contemporary art.
Double Grammar Zone is the inaugural PHOTO OP. exhibition and the first release of PHOTO OP. editions.
PHOTO OP. is a new curatorial platform for contemporary art in lens-based media founded by Emil McAvoy.
PHOTO OP.’s first season of exhibitions is hosted by Skar Image Lab.
Matt Henry (born 1973) lives and works in Wellington, New Zealand. Henry’s paintings, photographs and installations play with the minimalist idiom, summoning new readings and contextual shifts through altered scale, media and materials. Often incongruous, his paradoxically mimetic form of non-objective art invites interactions between art and the everyday.
He received an MFA from Melbourne’s RMIT University in 2008, and his work is held in public and private collections including the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade, and Elevation Capital Art Collection.
His exhibition highlights include: Space Suit, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2018); Long Division, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (2016); Personal Recordings, Goya Curtain, Tokyo (2016); High Fidelity, Starkwhite, Auckland (2013); From the series 16:9, Sydney Non Objective (2012); Melbourne International Art Fair (2012); User Friendly, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland (2011); Vernacular Painting, Starkwhite, Auckland (2011); and Contraflow, Starkwhite, Auckland (2010).
Lead image credit: Matt Henry, Redaction 5750 (2021-22), Fuji UV cured ink on polyethylene corflute, 898 x 898mm, PHOTO OP. edition of 10 + 2 A/P, from the exhibition Double Grammar Zone, PHOTO OP. instagram.com/photoopnz
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