Artist: Matthew Kirk

Halsey McKay Gallery presents Digging A Hole Into the Sun, Matthew Kirk’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Kirk uses his signature mark-making and glyphic imagery to reflect his Navajo heritage and identity in new shaped paintings and sculpture that expand conventional painting beyond the standard rectilinear canvas and through incorporating weaving techniques and found materials. His works explore the space between the hegemonic American visual image of the Native and his lived experience, exploiting the hackneyed to both embrace and question imposed cultural tropes. Kirk is known for his inventive use of commercial building materials, and his latest scultpural work is inspired by, and incorporates, the physical components of his studio. Finding inspiration in the residual marks on his homemade drawing tables and notes on his studio walls, he cuts these materials up with saws and reassembles them to generate new shapes. These intuitively cobbled forms suggest objects and characters from the natural world, such as animal hides, human figures, or in the work Nothing Left to Burn, two birds locked in an embrace.

Matthew Kirk (b. 1978, Ganado, AZ) in an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation who lives and works in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at FIERMAN, NY; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; Makasiini Contemporary, Turku, Finland; Louis B. James, NY, among others. He is a 2019 recipient of the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship. His work is in the collections of the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; the Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN; the Forge Collection, Taghkanic, NY, among others.