KAJE is pleased to present Subsurface, a solo exhibition of new work by artist Matthew Schrader, including the release of Ensemble, a limited edition publication of the artist’s photographs.

Subsurface brings Schrader’s ongoing sculptural engagement with landscape and the built environment into proximity with the complex geographic conditions surrounding KAJE in Gowanus, Brooklyn—a region bearing historic degrees of industrial contamination and land abuse. While taking up the area’s environmental concerns, Subsurface is not bound explicitly to the site of KAJE within this coordinate structure. Works on view have materialized through deep attention to divisions, resistance, entanglement, barriers, force, and ground, as these attributes fuse and interlock in terrain Schrader has been mapping across innumerable sites over the past decade, forming a kind of syntax for reading the forms his research practice yields. Accordingly, the collection of works presented in Subsurface assume a transposable legend for navigating any terrain where the standard rhythms of the built environment break or open up. 

The exhibition itself was preceded by a vision of boring a hole directly through the floor of KAJE’s ground-level gallery. While imagining what a hole might expose is itself a kind of paradox, penetration as an intentional act of seeking subterranean earth through the concrete slab that is the floor is existential. This raw impulse was however, intercepted by an infrastructural regulation, forcing the drive to proceed first through Ground Penetrating Radar of the slab’s hidden contents. Scans were performed to detect cross-sectional 3D slice images at different depths in the concrete, revealing files that look like heatmaps, or aerial images of landscape.

Moving in and out of the immediate surface of the earth, the exhibition also includes works made from unfired clay that Schrader collected from roadsides and refined over the past year. The processual distillation of the earthen material suspends the forms in an atemporal location where spatial boundaries loosen and dissolve. Valerian root is scattered across the floor of the exhibition space, invoking its medicinal properties in treating insomnia, cultivating realms of deep sleep and connection with the subconscious.

The exhibition will culminate with the release of Ensemble, a publication featuring a selection of Schrader’s photographic research from 2022—2024, with contributions by writer and scholar Sarah Jane Cervenak and poet Ed Roberson. Ensemble offers a core sample of Schrader’s ongoing practice of tracing sites and scenes photographically, wherein conceptual positions grow from captured aberrations in the constructed world. The spontaneous growth patterns of the Ailanthus altissima tree species have operated as a primary signifier in these photographic pursuits, leading the artist’s aperture along entangled divisions of space and matter, where barriers appear resisted and pierced through the force of what cuts up through the ground.

During the run of Subsurface, a reading will be held to mark the release of Ensemble. Details to come.

BIO

Matthew Schrader is a visual artist working between sculpture, photography, and spatial intervention. Recent projects have engaged aspects of public space, colonized landscapes, and plant migration. He received an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Schrader’s work has appeared in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, White Columns, Franz Kaka, Brief Histories, Someday, P!, and The Abrons Art Center. He is a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in New York City and the Howard Foundation Fellowship in Object Based Arts and Installation Based Arts.