Our second "Looking Local” profile is on the topic of Home. Sea Farm City proudly presents two exceptional works: Justin Lowman’s Barn Rays, and Matthew Usinowicz’s Extra Ties.
Justin Lowman’s Barn Rays is an exquisitely crafted artist’s book that documents the ongoing light-based installation he created in a dilapidated barn on his family’s property in the San Fernando Valley. Interspersed with text and photographs taken by the artist, are colored transparencies and metallic pages that create an experience that perfectly portray the shifting light, color and dimensionality of the original site work.
Justin Lowman's Barn Rays
Matthew Usinowicz’s Extra Ties is an ode to the food culture and butcher shops that raised him in his hometown, Salt Lake City, UT and later in his beloved San Francisco, CA. The book appears in Looking Local in two forms: a full-color artist book encased in a hand-carved wood and brass sculpture (appropriately bound in butcher's twine) and a limited edition zine that pays homage to his punk rock roots. Extra Ties offers an insider’s look at the dedication and physicality that the craft of butchering requires, and compliments it with a gallows humor that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in the service industry.
Matthew Usinowicz's Extra Ties
To make art about one’s home isn’t always a comfortable task. So much of today’s artwork has a certain aloof quality. It’s often cool (approaching cold) and can shy away from overt displays of ownership. Barn Rays and Extra Ties exist far outside this relatively safe dynamic. To create a work about where one lives requires an investment (in every sense of the word.) The biographies of Barn Rays and Extra Ties are bound with their makers. To know one is to gain insight into the other.
Visit Antenna Gallery by May 31st to experience Barn Rays and Extra Ties in person.
See the the text that SFC’s own Matt Allison wrote for Extra Ties here.
Buy Matthew’s Trade Tools here.
See more of Matthew’s work here.