The catalogue includes all visual and textual works that are a part of the EnGendered Species Exhibitions.

Matthew Best | Falls Church, Virginia

Inspired by cultural views of gender, Best’s Paper Roses series explores the gendered body. Matthew Best explains that,”The paint becomes the mode of investigation relating to Freudian theories of sexual difference.” Using paint in place of body fluids, Best performs the act of producing the work through the gendered structure of the art historical underpinnings of Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler. Each of these abstract expressionists employed a different gender specific method of painting. Pollock’s drip brush technique emblemized the male secretions of bodily fluids dripped down onto the canvas. In contrast Frankenthaler’s stain and pour paintings provided the essence of feminine fluids. The gender coding of these art historical mark makings and theories provided Best with an artist lineage to research and enhance. Therefore these two artists are referenced both aesthetically and theoretically in this series of paintings.

The images each create a gender code of the body through form, color, and material. The forms are an assemblage of male and female genitalia and sexual organs which Best mixes and merges to explore the boundaries of gender. The high intensity of the pinks, purples, and reds gives the color a decorative and feminized contrast to the predominantly phallic forms. Although Best uses the same acrylic paint in each work he thickens and thins it to suit each type of gender-specific mark-making.

Best considers the interaction of the paint with the surface as the Frankenthaler-type stains literally penetrate the canvas. He manually maintains these gender coded stains by rubbing them into the surface. This act of paint application recreates the cultural labels of housekeeping, the scrubbing of a floor as “woman’s work”. This penetrative paint application is contrasted with the Pollock type drips made with a thicker gel that allows them to remain on top of the surface of the canvas. These marks were applied with a performative flicking of the brush at the canvas below, made famous by Pollock. By using the same paint application methods as Pollock and Frankenthaler, Best is acting out a form of gender performance as he re-creates gender identified painting actions. Paper Roses was originally shown as a series of 80 paintings, gridded across a wall space, 6’ tall by 20’ wide. In its large installation form, Paper Roses unfolds in a complex system of unending transgendered combinations of colors, drips and stains.

- by Sarah Finer

This work is seen only in the EnGendered Species online gallery.

Matthew Best
Paper Roses, 2004-2005
Acrylic on raw canvas
10” x 12”




Matthew Best
Paper Roses (detail), 2004-2005
Acrylic on raw canvas
10” x 12”

Matthew Best
Paper Roses (detail), 2004-2005
Acrylic on raw canvas
10” x 12”