LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- MoMA PS1 presents the inaugural solo museum exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Math Bass (American, b. 1981). Off the Clock includes a selection of paintings from the Newz! Series, recent sculptures, and also debuts Basss latest video, Drummer Boi (2015). The Second Floor Project Rooms at MoMA PS1 have been architecturally transformed to reflect the artists ongoing interest in the way bodies move through space, probing the porousness of defined structures.
Bass is interested in ambiguous images that produce multiple ways of seeing a single composition. The most famous examples of these kinds of pictures include optical illusions like the profile of a duck that also looks like a rabbit, or the profile of an old woman that also looks like a young woman turning her head away. Employing a simplified formal languagesolid colors, natural materials, basic geometric shapes, and recognizable symbolsBasss works oscillate between bodily and architectural forms, emphasizing the tension between containment and mobility.
Basss paintings deploy a personal lexicon that centers on possible actions or transitional spaces: cigarettes emit plumes of smoke; alligators emerge with mouths wide open; letters and punctuation marks twist and overlap; and archways, staircases, and zigzags suggest movement. Basss sculptures are similarly dynamic bending, leaning, and slithering across the floor and wall implying potential actions or movements and corresponding bodily positions. Additionally, Bass invited artist Lauren Davis Fisher (b. 1984, Cambridge, Massachusetts) to present a two-part work that excises from two gallery walls a space equal to the exact proportions of an alcove beneath a staircase in Basss Los Angeles studio.
Certain forms recur throughout Basss work, changing colors and shifting their orientations to complicate and prolong the viewers engagement with them over time. In the artists words, the scene is set on an axis, and that axis is made to shift. Off the Clock animates the transition from work or labor to a space of leisure or play. If the clock represents rigidity, linearity, or someone elses authority, then off the clock implies a more personal, open-ended realm that cannot be pinned down. Evoking bodies, but refusing easy identification, Basss work insists upon multiple readings with elusive conclusions.
Basss work has been exhibited at Overduin & Co., Los Angeles; Wallspace, New York; Laurel Gitlen, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and Silberkuppe, Berlin; among others. Bass was also recently featured in the 2012 Hammer Museum Biennial, Made in L.A.