Matthew Cusick: Map Paintings

October 23 – December 25, 2004

Kent Gallery is pleased to announce its relocation to 541 West 25th Street in the heart of the Chelsea arts district. Inaugurating this new second floor gallery will be a new body of work by Matthew Cusick based on the "fugitive in American society" that will portray important figures from American history that have used the highway as a means of transgression. Focusing on subjects such as Bonnie and Clyde, America's most famous bank robbing couple, to Robert Moses, the true father of our modern roadways and master builder of New York City's transportation infrastructure, Cusick constructs his newest paintings by embedding fragments of vintage 20th century maps onto prepared wood panels. Using the very instruments of his subject's transgressions (maps), the realized image becomes a myopic deconstruction of the subjects own timeline and history.

The juxtaposition and layering of found maps from different periods of America's highway development also brings into focus the American landscape as an organic entity with a dense mesh of roads being the veins conducting the burning consumption of fuel. In relationship to this observation, and coupled with the "crash and burn" mentality of his subjects, Cusick is also developing a group of panel drawings made using a heated needle to burn lines at various temperatures.