The Bulletin Board: Mathew Sawyer

The tenth installation for White Columns’ project space The Bulletin Board – a 6’ x 4’ glazed aluminum bulletin board installed in our entrance lobby – is a display by the London-based artist and musician Mathew Sawyer. This will be Sawyer’s first solo project in New York. Acclaimed for his sometimes melancholic, sometimes maudlin, sometimes melodramatic world-view, Sawyer’s project documents the artist’s frustrated attempts to communicate with the inhabitants of the apartment directly below his. In addition to his modest, tragic-comic artworks Sawyer continues to experiment with songwriting as a kind of quasi-social/sculptural form. (Check out his band The Ghosts at www.myspace.com/theghostsmyspace).

Like the artists Bas Jan Ader or Lee Lozano, who infected the sometimes sterile terrain of Conceptual art with unabashed emotion, Sawyer isn’t afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve. As with the songs of the musicians he clearly adores (e.g. Robert Wyatt or the Television Personalities’ Dan Treacy) Sawyer’s works are at once uncomfortably personal and uncannily universal.

Mathew Sawyer (b.1977) lives and works in London. He has had solo exhibitions at the Galleria Sonia Rosso, Turin; and Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco (both 2005). Group shows include: ‘Situation Comedy’, Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii; ‘Documentary Creation’, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern, Switzerland (both 2005); ‘Your Heart Is No Match For My Love’, Soap Factory, Minneapolis (2004); ‘The Distance Between Me and You’, Lisson Gallery, London; ‘Someone To Share My Life With’, The Approach, London (both 2004); ‘To Whom It May Concern’, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2003); and ‘Protest and Survive’, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1999.) He received an MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2002, and a BA from Chelsea College of Art, London.

Mathew Sawyer’s project has been organized by White Columns’ Curator Amie Scally.
The Bulletin Board series is generously supported by Corrie Sandelman.