San Francisco Release of Matt Volla's Unruly Drawings

Mollusk Surf Shop
4500 Irving St., San Francisco, CA

Opening Reception Fri July 27 2007 7-10 pm

Come celebrate the book release by Front 40 Press of Matt Volla's Unruly Drawings and the surfboard launch of 2 hand-painted surfboards music by the R&BFreeJazzGospelSupreme80

Earwaves is a body of work that explores the act of hearing by drawing comparisons between ocean waves, sound waves and the waves of fluid inside the human ear that occur during the action of "hearing." Hearing begins when vibrating air molecules from the environment bounce off the eardrum. This vibrates a few small bones which transmit the vibration into the cochlea. The cochlea is filled with salt water and the vibrations move through the water creating waves. The waves wash over hair cells that release charged molecules into the brain.

Earwaves is the first chapter in a narrative of drawings recently documented in a book published by Front 40 Press entitled Matt Volla's Unruly Drawings. In the book, pre-knot embryos coagulate in the dark depths of salty fluid. They surface through the crashing earwaves before swarming into the atmosphere in their evolution towards knots and beyond!

Matt Volla is an Oakland based artist and musician whose art practice involves two different directions. One pursuit is conceptual and absurdist and involves setting up intricate systems in an attempt to quantify everyday actions. The results are used to translate those actions into a new action. The other direction Volla takes in his work is a strict discipline of automatic drawing and is an intuitive balance to his more cerebral conceptual practices. The drawings are a playful submersion into the subconscious revealing a loose narrative of their 10 year evolution. Volla is now in the process of animating the drawings. Matt Volla has shown throughout America including PS1/MOMA in New York, Yerba Buena Center fot the Arts in San Francisco and Gallery 2 in Chicago.