Adrienna Matzeg’s work often recalls bright summer afternoons, her vibrant table scapes conjuring a lunchtime setting at an alfresco cafe. But her latest series, After Hours, departs from her previous work completely. The punch needle pieces on black linen depict nighttime moments as conjured by memory. The collection, on view at Toronto’s Abbozzo Gallery, is Matzeg’s first physical solo show (she also exhibits her tapestries online). And it draws inspiration from her experiences on a trip to Jeju Island, South Korea and Kyoto, Japan.
It was so hot and humid during the days that Matzeg and her partner could only sightsee in the morning and at night. “I had this crazy vertigo the whole trip. So that’s what defined the night portion of this project,” she explains. “We did more at night because of how uncomfortable it was to go outside during the day.” The two had also purchased a new camera that allowed them to use a film-like setting. The result: dreamy images of cities at night.
When she got home, Matzeg also bought a colour printer; she printed out her photographs, cut them out and pinned them up. Images of a 7-Eleven facade lit up from within, a lantern glowing against a wall and – of course – a portable fan lying prone on an inscrutable surface are just some of the textile depictions she crafted from these images. One of the most evocative is of a taxi heading out into the night. “In Kyoto, the cabs are all these vintage crown comfort Toyotas, and they all have different little emblems on the top for the different companies — like a flower clover. They’re so precious.”
Matzeg sources her cotton threads in France and Japan. The black linen was completely new to her. “What the black linen does is take these scenes from a crazy, busy part of the city and everything else just falls away.” The objects and architectural structures sometimes seem to be floating against the backdrop — Matzeg likes to play with how she positions them on the canvas — the way that “memory comes to the surface, and everything else is just empty space around it,” she explains. “And I think that’s very special.”
For Matzeg, nudging fibre art from the realm of hobby craft is a core consideration. “I intentionally try to elevate the medium in the way that I approach it — in the detail, in the colours that I choose, also how I think about it, which is more like painting.” She’s shaping her scenes by sculpting shapes and carving colours, rather than relying on line work. This means that her architectural themes are uncannily tangible, even if they also feel like flattened snapshots. She’s translating the chrome and plastic surfaces of a karaoke bar facade into thread; she’s blending her loops into smooth gradients. “I think about it more in terms of planes and materials,” Matzeg says.
At the After Hours show at Abbozzo Gallery, the works are installed in shou sugi ban frames (by Superframe) and mounted on an aubergine-painted wall. Together, they appear like a series of windows into vibrant remembered moments — the vivid hues and sharp forms of the scenes popping against their black backgrounds like vivid reliefs. Sometimes, they even gently wrap around the borders of the canvas, blurring the boundaries between object and frame. They’re on show to delight and inspire until May 30.
All photos courtesy Abbozzo Gallery.
