This unique print project, comprised of a custom fabricated color swatch book and site-specific wall installation, resurrects a series of Matthew Metzger’s AC/DC white noise shadow paintings that was thought to have died in 2015. In it the artist wrestles with our contemporary obsession with “belonging,” a primary yet fickle approach to the construction of identity. Against the promise of connection, it always seems to leave us to “be” in a state of “longing” for community and togetherness in the face of the inevitable; death. Consider this, in 1982 AC/DC released a 12-inch record single of the anthem “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You).” This single, detached from its full-length LP of same name, and manufactured to be experienced separately, takes a song aimed at celebrating communities of devotion to antagonize the lonely. Those who are about to “rock” are in fact alienated and severed from those who are already “rocking” (those encompassed in the slippery linguistic shifter known as “We” in “We Salute You”).

For Metzger music is a lens through which to observe the more complicated aesthetics of belonging that feed abstraction. And so, all too regularly, these concepts whittle their way into surprising places like this collaboration.

“I almost exclusively think, plan, and make in my head, and fabricate in the studio. No drawings or sketches, no ephemera to be reimagined in print form. So the invitation to print was steeped in questions of belonging for me. How to work alongside others in the fabrication of something entirely new? How to collaborate, and to ultimately exist as part of a portfolio with other invited artists? To live as a family from here on out while trying to remain uniquely true to oneself (for whatever that means)? I wanted to imagine something that embodied these questions while remaining materially split, where identity was somehow interlocked between foreground and background, something to be used and something to be collected, something chosen and something constructed.”

Therefore Belonging: The Other Shadows is a special, two-part print. Through a meticulous color mixing process involving tone, hue, and opacity, printer Angee Lennard reproduced each of the five colors that Metzger used for the series of paintings Belonging (The Shadows) (2015) as screenprints that take the form of a color swatch guide. During that process every color was meticulously weighed and tracked to ensure the correct mixing formula at larger volumes for the second part of this print. Realized upon acquisition of the artist’s swatch book: an installation is executed based on a color selection where printing ink is custom mixed and a monochromatic shadow is printed over a collector’s wall. Once covered, the wall retains a hyper matte surface finish from the dried ink, archiving every subtle touch and abrasion over time. A choice and its shadow.