Utilising the aesthetics of graphic art, Matthew Brannon’s work explores the gulf between social ideals and personal crisis. Using screen printing as form of analogue reproduction, Brannon’s images carry both the suggestion of mass replication and aura of original artworks. Directly challenging the void between language and actuality, Brannon often combines text and image to illustrate the potential for dysfunction. In Police Officer Giving Up, Brannon juxtaposes a neutral symbol of a houseplant with a statement of desperation. Exuding the inadequate sentiment of greeting cards, Brannon offers decoration as a feeble mask for emotional depletion.

In Matthew Brannon’s How It All Ends he creates an ironic game of semiotics, using an abstracted plant as a visual representation of the accompanied text. Reworking a subject associated with art historical religious paintings, he doesn’t present a fiery Armageddon or cherubic heaven, but rather a bland composition reminiscent of wall paper swatches or gift shop stamps. The image is compelling through its crafted elegance, creating a blithe meditative focus. In confronting the spiritual, Brannon offers a bereft philosophy, conceiving the human condition with disappointment and chagrin. 

Matthew Brannon’s work investigates media imagery as a cultural interface, exploring the gap between expectation and inadequacy. Using topical problems such as substance abuse, body image, and class divide as metaphors for social and psychological fractioning, Brannon pits visual ‘ideals’ versus internalised corruption to create conceptual instances of breakdown. In Hair of the Dog, Brannon’s clip art-style motif reduces the idea of individuality to an infinitely replicable generic. Coupled with a cynical script typeset in ornamental font his blossoms become emblematic of disease, addiction, and futility.

Matthew Brannon’s prints convey a poetic distillation. Conjuring a complete image from the most meagre information, the ‘messaging’ of Brannon’s images is transferred through their subtlety of form. Situated between luxurious refinement and divested replication, Brannon adopts the associations of design to comment on psychology as by-product of consumer environment. In Sick Whore, Brannon underscores a spindly plant with an abject description or insult. Embossed with the finality of an epitaph, Brannon sums up a totality of a frail, abused, and embarrassing existence.

Matthew Brannon’s HYENA is presented as a vinyl LP atop a plinth. Illustrating the effectiveness of packaging over content, the object exudes a precious quality as product and collectable. The recording itself, however is much more sinister. Featuring a caged hyena at a Berlin zoo, the soundtrack captures a disturbing symphony of clattering metal, audience rumblings, and breaking bones, beneath an aria of the animal’s frantic bark-laughter. In this discrepancy between outward appearance and contained turmoil, Brannon creates a haunting analogy for tenuity of human experience.

Taking emotional vulnerability and solecism as a starting point for investigation, Matthew Brannon often situates his work around themes of self-destructive behaviours that outwardly reflect inner dysfunction, what he describes as “personal pathologies”. Other People’s Money extols the complications of careerism; the image of a limpid dripping/bleeding eel is both trophy and pitiful personification. Brannon describes the grey area of morality in the stark contrast of black and white, cut through by a tread patterned diagonal stripe suggesting a ‘hit and run’ hierarchy of ethics.

In People Who Divide People, Matthew Brannon adapts his eel motif as a logo of power and class divide. The image itself contains multiple symbolism: as loathsome viper, lowly animal, and revolutionary icon of early America. Rendered in black and white, the delicate pattern is reminiscent of both lace and tire tracks. Humorously recalling the colonial motto “Don’t Tread On Me”, Brannon’s snake supplants ideas of freedom liberation as an elitist decal of ‘good taste’.

Matthew Brannon’s Switching Positions is executed as a wall mural. Showing an entanglement of knives, Brannon conceives not a logo of violence, but apathy. Rendered in black and dripping ‘blood’, Brannon’s blades are diminished to the international language of pictograph signposting, exuding an outline of ‘idea’ rather than a portent of immediate threat. Through this reduction, Brannon presents content as void: his weapons are represented by a blank vacancy, precariously balanced in harmonious composition. Emblazoned in grand scale, Switching Positions presents an unnerving propaganda of disconsolation and hopelessness.