Matthew Angelo Harrison: Proto

Hosted at Kunsthalle Basel, the show features all new work and is the artist most ambitious project to date.

Matthew Angelo Harrison’s polished blocks of transparent resin are time capsules of a sort where the personal and ancestral collide with the historical and political.

Deriving from the Greek proto, for “earliest” or “first,” a prototype is the opposite of a finished product or a model built to test out the validity of a concept or process. As such, it is a material projection of something that hadn’t existed before and, in that sense, helps imagine a future.

Harrison’s work is a sort of result of time travel: antiquated and futuristic, organic and mechanical, ritualistic and industrial at once.