Matthew Brannon: I’m afraid we’re going to have to cancel our reservation

Matthew Brannon is best known for his letterpress and screen prints of incongruous combinations of images and text. These prints are rendered in a subtle, stripped-down aesthetic, evoking mass production and marketing design. For a 2006 series of blue and black silkscreen prints, Brannon paired representations of potted plants with grim subtitles such as Sick Whore and How It All Ends, in keeping with his thematic interest in pathology and personal struggle. Brannon’s sculptures exhibit a similar pictorial simplicity, often executed in few colors and with meticulous attention to symmetry and balance. Like a stage set for the performance of a play set on board a ship, the mixed-media installation Nevertheless (2009) features a minimalist turquoise and white model of a bedroom, adorned with curtains and decorative bottles carved from balsa wood—a space both beautiful and somehow bereft.