In 2019 I was talking to Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley about Aesthetic Suicide, their wall
piece consisting of an X containing a quote by the enigmatic playwright and Warhol-shooter
Valerie Solanas. Nearby was their work Barbara Hepworth Table, a slab of raw timber with
natural holes in it, riffing on the idea that Hepworth was the first person to put a “hole” in
sculpture in 1931. Justin Clemens interjected and asked “And who was the first person to put a
hole in Andy Warhol?” It was the last time I remember genuinely laughing in an artist talk.

Alongside X’s and O’s in Mathews’ works I have been thinking not of Warhol's work, but of the
way various permutations of the idea of “stock” pervaded his life. The factory; stock yards; stock
images; the stock of the soup can; something distilled into its essence or median. Mathews'
recurring glint of silver and forms distilled from stock feeders remind me that Warhol first talked
about his floating silver balloons as meandering cows free from the gallery architecture
(consider the urban imagination - conflating emancipation with cows). The recurring motif of a
gate or window in Mathews' work reminds me that Solanas only stopped shooting everyone in
the factory repeatedly because the silver elevator doors unexpectedly opened behind her, mid
rampage, and Fred Hughes yelled “There's the elevator! Just take it!” She ran back in and the
doors closed.

Mathews’ works are conjured from the intelligence of clamps, wheels, gates, fences, windows...
basically tacit guides for how to move and look. Just like elevator doors (or a gun), their
appearance alone implies an action. Mathews’ pieces are handmade and technically functional,
but also diagrams - the size of humans; the boiled down ingredients of industrial agriculture and
modernist museum design. In all my time in art schools, galleries, and perusing media, work that
is most successfully “comprehended” is usually somehow in conversation with a room,
approachable by a human. Comprehension of design is a treat and confusion by design is a
threat; understand the assignment and get fed. Understand meaning, and get fed. Dwell in
not-knowing and receive the stick. I imagine that by the time the human species ends, in some
kind of mass-fermentation/ripening event where humans “go off” because of the relentless
humidity; such a large portion of the world will be adapted to human dimensions that other
aspects of nature will begin to parasitically adapt to them too. Consider the native white Ibis; the
bin is a feedlot; a dump is a sanctuary; they scour the city; the city is a dump.

Like Hepworth’s hole, stock images were developed in the early 20th century, to save publishers
money. As media and communication sped up, stock images were used for education and most
recently memes. Their progression into tools for meme making demonstrate how an image that
is developed to quickly communicate an idea can have its meaning internalised through
repetition, and understood to mean something different. The absurdity of representing the carrot
and the stick metaphor visually is that it is also internalised. In Mathews' work, three
median-human-sized feeders represent the internalisation of the carrot and the stick. Reward
and discipline is distilled in each form.

The images are stretched out to the limit of the gallery. This is an obedient nod to the authority
of the gallery dimensions. Do they hold up? The images’ distortion is only the most subtle
challenge to our comprehension. They signify incomprehension, but never commit fully to
full-blown confusion. It’s tonal, like, ccaarrrroott and ssttiicckk. We are at this point now, where
the master's tools are the same as the slaves, and transcendence comes through variations in
voice and tone. All the ingredients socialise in the same stock. Consider it a concentration camp
for looking.

Text courtesy of George Egerton-Warburton