The installation Ethylene Spring embodies climate change anxiety through an
interactive installation riffing on the tripod seat of the Oracle of Delphi
housed within the Temple of Apollo. From atop this iconic seat, which
straddled a fissure in the earth, the fume enshrouded Pythia would deliver
her prophecies to desperate visitors. In Ethylene Spring, Hebert asks
visitors to take turns ascending the tripod to bathe in the custom scented
fog from a machine at its base. While there, they can freely rotate their
seat to view the surrounding landscape, all the while hearing a selection of
dark prophecies beamed straight to their perch. These weather-related
snippets will come from various sources including poetry, cinema, news
coverage, and pop music. Contrasted with these somewhat inscrutable excerpts,
the other elements of the experience will be rather visceral. Between
ascending the ladder, inhaling the scented vapors, spinning on the turntable,
and hearing the words emerge from all the ambient noise of the surroundings,
the visitor should find themselves truly discombobulated.
***
Matthew Hebert has been working under the studio name eleet warez (www.eleetwarez.net) since
shortly after completing his undergraduate studies in the mid-90s. The name
is borrowed from hacker culture and is suggestive of the technical
sophistication, improvisational spirit, and freewheeling appropriation that
is essential to his work. Matthew creates work that deals with technology
and its effects on the domestic environment and our sense of space. His work
takes recognizable forms and layers new forms of use and meaning onto them.
Ultimately, the work generates new forms of interaction between the user,
the object, and the environment.
Matthew’s work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of
Contemporary Art San Diego, The Berkeley Art Museum, The Milwaukee Art
Museum, The Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco; The California
Center for the Art, Escondido; The Chicago Cultural Center, and Core77 in
New York. Additionally, Matthew is a member of the collaborative public art
team, Unmanned Minerals, with Reno based poet Jared Stanley and Los Angeles
based artist Gabie Strong.
Matthew received his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of
California, Berkeley; and his Master of Fine Arts from California College of
the Arts. He has taught at several schools including the University of
Wisconsin – Madison, CalArts, and The School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. He is currently Associate Professor of Art at San Diego State
University.
BEST PRACTICE is a not-for-profit exhibition space located in the Barrio Logan neighborhood of San Diego, CA for projects from regional, national, and
international artists and curators.
For its first two years, BEST PRACTICE existed at two locations in San Diego: within an institutional glass-enclosed bulletin board housed within the
Department of Art, Architecture + Art History at the University of San Diego, and on a Sony Trinitron PVM20L5 video monitor which screened video works
installed at Helmuth Projects.
BEST PRACTICE was founded by Joe Yorty and Allie Mundt in 2016.