DISPATCH presents Escalator to Common Art featuring the work of Mark Van Yetter and Matt Hoyt. Declining the scale and production value of current artistic output, Yetter and Hoyt have each carved out unique practices and share a position of considered refusal, choosing instead to engage parallel anachronisms and prehistories of modernism in both aesthetic and process.

Mark Van Yetter, primarily a painter and draftsman, draws upon a range of intuitive and art historical styles — unexpectedly recalling the color and gesture of Delacroix or late Degas to the frenetic compositions of Georg Grosz. These formalisms, extending back to the dawn of European modern art, function as stylistic and representational cues that situate the work in contrast to current contemporary trends and global artistic output. Underlying the work is a return to origin similar to the early projects of expressionists and surrealists. And yet, Yetter’s work is not one of reactionary aesthetics or modes but rather an attempt to articulate the contemporary moment with particular urgencies of the past.

Matt Hoyt’s small and intimate pieces have an extrasculptural status — their scale relates more to the human hand than to the full human body. His arrangement of his hand-made objects, crafted from found and ordinary materials, shows a carefully considered, idiosyncratic process. The objects are the result of a series of scenarios unfolding in the artist’s imagination; and each object itself may be one in a series of permutations or attempts at a given subject. However, Hoyt is careful to stress, “The pieces are never the execution of a technique nor the expression of any clear and logical idea or concept.” Rather, the work could be seen as the precipitation from a series experiments and intuitive decisions made by the artist. The results, like Yetter’s work, are created from a chain of meditations with a mix of lean resourcefulness and intentionality.

Mark Van Yetter received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY, with studies at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include Hotel, London and Galerie Micky Schubert, Berlin, among others. Lives and works in Pennsylvania and Istanbul. Matt Hoyt received his BFA in 2000 from the School of Visual Arts. Past exhibitions include a group show at Massimo Audiello and solo project at Marquise Dance Hall. Lives and works in New York.

l-r, Mark Yetter, Portrait of Jonas Lipps as Young Man, 2001; Matt Hoyt, Untitled, 2001