Matthew Hebert
Ethylene Spring
September 11 & 12, 2021
presented at Other Places Art Fair (OPaf)
The installation Ethylene Spring embodies climate change anxiety through an interactive installation riffing on the tripod seat of the Oracle of Delphi housed within the Temple of Apollo. From atop this iconic seat, which straddled a fissure in the earth, the fume enshrouded Pythia would deliver her prophecies to desperate visitors. In Ethylene Spring, Hebert asks visitors to take turns ascending the tripod to bathe in the custom scented fog from a machine at its base. While there, they can freely rotate their seat to view the surrounding landscape, all the while hearing a selection of dark prophecies beamed straight to their perch. These weather-related snippets will come from various sources including poetry, cinema, news coverage, and pop music. Contrasted with these somewhat inscrutable excerpts, the other elements of the experience will be rather visceral. Between ascending the ladder, inhaling the scented vapors, spinning on the turntable, and hearing the words emerge from all the ambient noise of the surroundings, the visitor should find themselves truly discombobulated.
Matthew Hebert has been working under the studio name eleet warez since shortly after completing his undergraduate studies in the mid-90s. The name is borrowed from hacker culture and is suggestive of the technical sophistication, improvisational spirit, and freewheeling appropriation that is essential to his work. Matthew creates work that deals with technology and its effects on the domestic environment and our sense of space. His work takes recognizable forms and layers new forms of use and meaning onto them. Ultimately, the work generates new forms of interaction between the user, the object, and the environment.
Matthew’s work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Berkeley Art Museum, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco; The California Center for the Art, Escondido; The Chicago Cultural Center, and Core77 in New York. Additionally, Matthew is a member of the collaborative public art team, Unmanned Minerals, with Reno based poet Jared Stanley and Los Angeles based artist Gabie Strong.
Matthew received his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley; and his Master of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts. He has taught at several schools including the University of Wisconsin – Madison, CalArts, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently Associate Professor of Art at San Diego State University.
