Simeon Nelson

Ornamatrix (for Sol le Witt), is a floor work that forms an architectonic latticework. It is a crystalline matrix ornamented in a Jacobean fret. The piece uses metaphors of crystalline growth and epitaxis; the formation of crystalline structures that arise from a pre-existing lattice. In Ornamatrix the ornament is the structure. The reworking of a Minimalist grid in this highly ornamental way is a critique of the banality of purist abstraction and the tendency of such (masculine) abstraction to ignore more emotional, embodied (feminine) aspects of experience. Ornamatrix is a feminized masculine structure - Sol le Witt in drag.

This work fills and warps the small space of H29. It sets up an oppositional grid, offset to the grid of the space by 30 or so degrees. It becomes an awkward historicist anomaly in the crisp neutrality of this contemporary art space and questions notions of progressivism and relations between high art and the vernacular.