Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present three videos by Winnipeg-based artist Sylvia Matas. Recognized for her poetic and exacting videos, drawings, and texts, Matas’ work often references the cyclical nature of events in time, both personal and cosmological. Her precise, diagrammatic drawings often take as their subject the vast concepts of time and space, and more specifically, the ways in which we demarcate and categorize these natural phenomenona.

Her videos ambiguously ask viewers to consider and question the meaning of signs, logic and narrative.  The three videos being presented at Plug In ICA, Fall, Out of Nowhere, and That day, this time, each feature a static geographical landscape onto which a narrative is grafted. Through image and text, Matas creates foreboding, fragmentary narratives that blur the distinction between physical and psychological space(s). Formally spare, Matas’ videos nonetheless tend to follow intricate, spiralling routes.

Sylvia Matas is a Winnipeg-based interdisciplinary artist whose drawings, texts and videos explore psychological landscapes, natural phenomena and individual experience. Matas received her BFA from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg and her MFA from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. Her work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including A Certain Distance, Lisa Kehler Art + Projects, Winnipeg; vast, constant, irreversible, MKG127, Toronto; Red Shift, Mercer Union, Toronto. Matas’ work has been included in various collective exhibitions, including Looking Up: Contemporary Connections with Inuit Art, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg; Resonant Field, TRUCK Contemporary Art, Calgary; and Condensation, Decima Gallery, London, among others. She is represented by Lisa Kehler Art + Projects in Winnipeg.

Plug In ICA gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. We thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their support of our 2016 and 2017 program, and we extend gratitude to The Winnipeg Foundation and all our generous donors, valued members and dedicated volunteers.

For general inquiries please contact: info@plugin.org

For media inquiries please contact: Sarah Nesbitt at sarah@plugin.org or by phone at (204) 942-1043 ext. 27