Matthew Northridge at Gorney Bravin + Lee - "Continent "exhiibition of sculpture and collage

Delivering on the promise of New City, a sprawling metropolis of a sculpture displayed at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 2002, Matthew Northridge presented three sculptures and 21 collages in his impressive solo debut. Collectively titled Continent, these new collages conjure vast realms of architecture and geography in small objects and economical gestures.

For many of his collages, Northridge clips aerial photographs of buildings from the pages of magazines, then isolates the tiny structures on sheets of white paper. While never surpassing the size of a thumbnail, each building imposes a strong sense of perspective on its otherwise blank support. In Hillside, Nepal (2002), for example, three thatched huts appear to climb an invisible mountain. A clutch of miniature farm buildings colonizes a corner of another collage and efficiently transforms the empty expanse of paper into receding meadows. In a separate group of collages, Northridge pastes innumerable drawings of gray and white cubes along the bottom edges of large sheets of paper. Stacked into low mounds and tall towers, they resemble grisaille cities seen from afar or, because a few of the cubes have open lids, warehouses full of cardboard boxes.

Similar shifts in the perception of scale are elicited by the artist's sculptures. On one wall of the gallery, Northridge pressed 100 pushpins into a tight circle (Pushpin [Laserbeam], 2003). Thimbles, beads, drill bits, springs, plastic pen parts and other assorted found objects were glued to the heads of the pins, creating a tapered cylinder that projected several inches from the wall. Despite its modest size, this homespun object has an architectural impact, and suggests the tip of a castellated tower.

The most elegant work in the show was aptly titled Horizon (2000-02). It consists of hundreds of acrylic hemispheres, each an inch in diameter, arranged in a long line across one wall. As the viewer obliquely approaches the sculpture, the hemispheres glow gold, green and a wide range of blues. Closer inspection reveals that each acrylic dot is transparent and magnifies an image of the ocean pasted to its back. While precisely aligned into a single, unbroken horizon, each vista features a slightly different seascape. Some are stormy, others serene. Some offer sunsets, while others contain tiny swimmers. By collapsing such vast dimensions into small, unobtrusive objects, Northridge seems to channel Jonathan Swift, sending the viewer traveling through his work like Gulliver.

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