About the Exhibition:
Anthony Gallery is pleased to present the reality-bending work of Matthew Burgess in Somethin’s Cookin’, a solo exhibition surveying suspension of disbelief in contemporary pop culture. Cropped movie stills and cartoon iconography harp on 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, an award-winning film whose fantastically impossible setting houses virtually contained characters in a three-dimensional world.
Burgess’ skillful use of chain stitch embroidery on canvas allows for playful conversation between paint and thread– an interaction that parallels the film’s groundbreaking multimedia approach. When coupled with strategically nostalgic subject matter, this emphasis on materiality encourages the viewer to reconsider the boundaries separating speculative fiction from lived experience.
The program’s narrative is one of mystery, deception, and hyperbolic parody that emphasizes the multiplicities of life itself. Snapshots from an iconic feature film tell the story of a fantastical world marked by a slew of scandalous rumors and whisperings of betrayal. The result is a sinister, scandalous world brimming with comic relief.
Somethin’s Cookin’ spotlights the inherent artificiality of life. It is both a kind reminder and sincere warning of an all-too-often duplicitous world; a narrative purporting that reality is not always as it seems and people are not always who they say they are.
