The notion of translation across mediums is a difficult and sometimes dangerous proposition. Mathew Weir is most certainly an exception to this rule, transitioning effortlessly from elaborate three dimensional sculptures to intensely realized paintings. Weir paints loose and often disturbing images based on small figurines that propose a strange and sometimes unsettling “kitsch idealism”.Inspired by the bizarre hidden narratives incorporated into many Germanic figurines as well as images from crime scene photographs, Weir reexamines this imagery, the sexual as well as racial stereotypes that inform them subtextually. Weir then recontextualizes these images through a process of selection and manipulation, to point up the violence inherent in these seemingly innocuous “scenes”, and to draw attention to how meaning changes when the images are redefined. The result is a series of intense and riveting images that are at once deeply personal and politically charged.
