Bert Green Fine Art is pleased to present our second solo show by Chicago-based contemporary artist Matthew Schlagbaum, and our first solo show by Los Angeles-based artist Victoria Reynolds.

Matthew Schlagbaum unites the media of sculpture, photography, and paint to depict metaphors for oppressive social structures that masquerade as universal ideals. Mainstream concepts of happiness, and their resulting recommended lifestyles, are exposed as methods of systematic social control. His images and sculptural objects are sometimes drained of color, viewed from behind, or seen as manipulated emotional and physical states of being that express the profound exclusion experienced by those who are not the intended audience.

Victoria Reynolds uses meat as a primary decorative motif, playfully applying its visceral qualities to the surface of the painting and the surrounding frame. There is an uneasy tension between the understanding of flesh as food, and our self-identification of it; her conflation of desire, mortality, viscerality, and the survival instinct is a powerful source of aesthetic fascination.