Matthew Brennen Wicks Show - Review by Jason Hackenwerth

Matthew Drennen

Punch Palace was more than an art exhibition. It was a journey into history. A distant memory. A peek into your grandmother’s junk drawer. It was a present-day visit to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.

The show reconciled a nostalgic misconception of our childhoods past as a simpler and safer time to the reality of adult preoccupations with security, power, and luck.

The exhibit consisted of a collection of familiar objects interestingly arranged by the artist. The relationships created by the proximity and placement of the works added new layers of context to the already weighty subject matter contained within. An example of this was a piece called Horseshoes. Each of the shoes was fancifully engraved. One with the word Light, the other, Weight. The two were intertwined and closely placed near a gold bunny. The first impression of this was a story of lucky objects and my grandfather tossing them around a steel peg on a late summer afternoon. But before the conclusion was set, the rabbit told a different tale. Shining gold with only one ear, this hare was shot through, bearing entry and exit wounds, hinting equally at fairy tale legend and melancholy loss of innocence. For me, the bunny represented each of our own broken hearts.

Aside from the two earthenware owl sentries perched on the title wall keeping an eye on all who enter, the works in the show were expertly hand-built or slip-cast porcelain. Looking closely at the objects one could feel the artists reverence for the history of the medium. While the collection commented clearly on colonialism and class, industrialist honor culture bubbles just beneath the narrative.

The origin of porcelain begins in China. For centuries, the Chinese were the only people who possessed the knowledge or skill to make it.

Porcelain dishes from China have long been a status symbol for the wealthy elites of the British Empire and later, Colonial America. And for us, everyone’s grandparents had a set of “Fine China.”

In a smart if not cynical marriage of cultures, Wicks created a suite of Porcelain Clay Pigeons as ornate and deliciously opulent as they were playfully collectible. The shooting range “skeets” are vestiges of our own ties to country and empire as well as the history of the medium itself.

Every piece of Wicks’ show gave evidence of his romanticism for the medium and a deep love for the beauty in mark-making. The closer one looks at each object the more ornamental detail can be discovered. For me this transcended fussiness and revealed a connection to the artists dialog with the post-contemporary conversation in art.

The show’s title, Punch Palace, was a reference to grand palatial estates and the privileged lives led by those inside the ornate wrought irons encircling them. Instead of a literal fence, Wicks gave us a chinheight row of only the lovely and dangerous pointed finials, leaving us to create the barrier in our minds, which worked beautifully, and was perhaps the strongest and most complex metaphor in the show.

Overall Punch Palace read like a 20th Century American poem. Stoic, yet sentimental. The longer one would linger and look, the more layers of clever contradictions lay bare. Everything about it felt classical while remaining relatable. •

Matthew Drennen Wicks is a full-time faculty member at University of Tampa College of Art and Design.