LONDON.- Here’s a funny thing, comedic, farcical, etc., were it not quite so portentously ominous… the first press text we wrote for a Matt Bollinger show (his first with mother’s tankstation, Collective Conscious[i], in 2021) inescapably featured a recently deposed POTUS attempting not an insurrectional storming of Capitol Hill, on January 6th, five years to the day in writing this. Having gotten away with that one, for Bollinger’s new, forthcoming show with the twentieth-birthday-celebrating-newly-expanded mother’s tanksation | London, it is once again hard not to reflect upon a new ‘over-stepping’ ; not an invasion/annexation of Venezuela… if we didn’t know any better, one could be forgiven for thinking that POTUS 2.1 is a limelight seeking individual bent on stealing Matt Bollinger’s thunder (amongst other things). A collector and supporter of the artist, who just happens to be a significant personage within the American storytelling industry for the past quarter century, once said in a phone call, something along the lines of “… the next time you do a show with Matt, you really should try and time it with…” Ironic really.
Dawn, a mutating, hand-painted stop motion animation is an extraordinary feat, that has taken the artist the best part of four years to complete. And its first European showing is the centrepiece of a two-part Bollinger exhibition, over two venues during 2026 (new paintings in the Dublin gallery in March/April). In Bollinger’s novelistic reality there are sufficient plot variations, randomly sequenced to the projector, so that the viewer should never experience a repeat narrative. Dawn, an ordinary young American woman, has been sleeping in her car for some time. In an attempt to carry on life as normally as possible under pressing circumstances, she has not told anyone, but wakes, and intends to head to work at an ubiquitous CVS pharmacy, sometimes she makes it, in various different ways, and sometimes she does not. Projected at scale (also viewable from the street[ii]) - in a manner whereby time seems to suspend in a CVS store, the unending tale is suspended in a sociological quagmire that not only speaks to and of middle-America, but a hypothetical, middle-everywhere. In a changing world of hard realities, Bollinger’s tone is never caustic, sardonic or judgmental, yet tender, thoughtful and sensitive to the mirrored realities of the fiction he draws, paints, animates.
As previously noted in various writings Matt Bollinger has created a grounded storyline of an invented, but meta-real town-stead, a close-knit community, Holmes, MO., whose inhabitants appear in serial, almost soap opera fashion from work to work; the most explicitly narrativistic of which being the exquisite animations that sumptuously ebb and flow with the pure passion of a natural painter over a fluid surface. Moved wet on wet on a translucent surface, Bollinger’s particular skill is akin the fabled story of Michelangelo’s capacity to read and unlock three dimensional forms trapped in blocks of Carrara marble. Bollinger’s brush in perfect unison with intent and intellect, creates small anti-bombastic gestures, minor incidents of daily life, the car not starting, or locking oneself out, that accrue and grow, combine and swell to quiet emotional climax. The viewer may never have the whole story in one go but one might speculate the quotidian captivation of the fable will keep the audience riveted and returning.
Dawn, also includes a collection of classic Bollinger graphics and his exquisite, sensitive, paintings of urban weeds[iii] - nature unfortunately in the wrong place but surviving moment to moment with outrageous optimism.
[i] https://www.motherstankstation.com/exhibition/collective-conscious/text/
[ii] Matt Bollinger’s Collective Conscious exhibition, 2021, featured another remarkable animation, Between the days, (https://www.motherstankstation.com/artist/matt-bollinger/video/9/) ambiently shown on a floating wall-mounted, painting-scale screen, so similarly viewed in natural light, it became a painting in time and space alongside the static canvases.
[iii] Richard Mabey discusses the definition of a weed as "a plant in the wrong place" in his 2010 book, Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants (Profile Books). He explores the cultural, social, and botanical implications of this phrase, arguing that weeds are not inherently ‘bad’ but rather plants that have been forced to adapted to human-disturbed environments:
Ever since the first human settlements 10,000 years ago, weeds have dogged our footsteps. They are there as the punishment of 'thorns and thistles' in Genesis and, two millennia later, as a symbol of Flanders Field. They are civilisations' familiars, invading farmland and building-sites, war-zones and flower-beds across the globe.
