Broken Lines
During his student years in New York, Matthews asked his friend Erickatoure Aviance how can you tell if someone is gay (it was still relatively dangerous to approach strangers in those days). Without a beat she replied ‘just look for the broken lines, gurl’. Her insinuation that gay men carry their bodies differently to the stiff, stick figure heterosexual American man – how they sit into their hips, a dropped wrist, the line of their fingers – has stayed with Matthews ever since.
Broken Lines plays with campness and the way the body performs the codes of gesture. In the works, Matthews reduces historical figures and art works down to their lines, looking at their postures and posings. Focusing on works that present the male figure in positions of power or desire, he highlights the “camp line” in these shows of masculinity and hierarchy.
