Matthew Ritchie October 20 – November 25, 2000
Main Gallery

The Astronaut is lost...
The Actress is alone...
The Golem is broken...
The Child is awake.

The Fast Set are growing up...

Parents and Children
Forget everything you know.

Another Miami
Another 1963

As a forgotten member of the Mercury astronaut team disappears, the pregnant actress confronts her ardent pursuer, the fossilized marrano known as "the Golem". An aging body-builder swims out to sea from the white sands of Bal Harbor for a date with reverse evolution while an elderly mam'bo is mounted by the mysterious "Mademoiselle Florida". The characters are trapped, simultaneously dissolving into the environment and asserting their own provisional identities in a dance between entropy and energy.

Each exhibition by Matthew Ritchie is a continuation of an unfolding larger story, the intertwined narrative of the 49 characters that inhabit Ritchie's lexical universe. "Parents and Children" is the penultimate chapter in the current sequence of works which began with "The Fast Set", a recent one person exhibition last March, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami and will conclude with an installation at the Dallas Museum of Art in January, 2001. Additional elements were shown this year at Mass MoCA and the Musee des Beaux Arts, Nantes.

Matthew Ritchie's work explores the nature of cultural information through a hidden "history" of the universe that references physics, gambling, religion, biology, genre fiction, geology, cartoons and numerous other self-referential systems. Ritchie's work creates both equity and parallels between what might ordinarily be considered disparate and contradictory notions. The physical manifestation of this installation mimics this same sense of fusion. Ritchie builds a constantly shifting combination of text, sculpture, painting and wall drawing into an improbable and exhilarating form of information architecture. Each element of Ritchie's work adds another dimension to this complex and layered structure, revealing another angle to the knowable and unknowable systems and cosmology that both inform and are simultaneously generated out of his work.

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