Matelli's work is sexy, recapturing the risky indeterminacy of meaning as it takes shape in metaphor and illusion. In Abandon, the artist's first site-specific installation, created for the Lightwell Gallery, Matelli uses weeds to explore metaphor and meaning. The project is deceptively simple, playful, and elegant in its subtlety. Weeds are a particularly apt vehicle for Matelli, since their truth is entirely metaphorical, deriving from relations vested in culture rather than in nature. In this, the meaning of weeds is entirely contingent on environment and perception.
Weeds are shrewd survivalists, and as such carry metaphoric weight.
Cast as sets of multiples, Matelli's weeds are differentiated by delicate surface treatments in paint. Matelli chooses the most tenacious sorts of weeds, a maverick plant life resistant to human intention and continuously thwarting efforts at eradication. Transformed by concept, process, multiplication and re presentation, Matelli's weeds are vessels of indeterminate meaning, open to a variety of simultaneous interpretations. Waving lightly in the gallery's forced air, as life redesigned through the malleable promise of plastic, Matelli's weeds exist in a shifting space between reality and artifice. They seem to be one thing, yet mean something else altogether.