Border Crossings review of exhibition at YYZ Artists' Outlet

"The concurrence of detail and scale (the sound of birds and the shape of the galaxy) underlines a less abstract relation between time and space. In Matas's narratives, insofar as they can be understood as narratives, time passing (an extinction) is correlated to an expansion of visual perspective on the universe. This connection is made explicit in a list labelled "notes on stones." Matas writes "to see the future/to mark the path/to protect from the sea/to bring good luck/to see the stars/to remember." Seeing is articulated as something beyond just an experience of the present, the visual positioned as a way to recall the past and divine the future." - Emily Doucet

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Exhibition Essay from YYZ Artists' Outlet

"One of the more mysterious qualities of Sylvia's work, whether it's a drawing or a book or a video, is the feeling of sound that her work implies. It always feels like there's an ambient rushing, like the sound of a distant waterfall. How does she do that? " - Tyler Bright Hilton

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Exhibition Essay from the Maclaren Art Centre
"Finding poetry in science and geography, both Hein and Matas interpret the relationships between nature, imagination and the scientific abstractions that underlie daily experience." -Renée van der Avoird

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Plug In ICA Press Release
"Through image and text, Matas creates foreboding, fragmentary narratives that blur the distinction between physical and psychological space(s). Formally spare, Matas' videos nonetheless tend to follow intricate, spiralling routes."

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Interview for solo exhibition A Certain Distance at LKA+P
"There is a slowness to taking it all in. Since the image in the video doesn't move, the story must play out in the viewer's imagination."

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Review of A Certain Distance in the Winnipeg Free Press
"Matas has spent years mapping relative distances with varying degrees of certainty, but this exhibition represents a newly forthright attempt to communicate what it's like to occupy those distances as a thinking, feeling person. The space she pictures is both thrilling and terrifying, lovely and deceptively calm."

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Interview with OneNightStand for A Forest
"We understand that our perception is limited and that the brain fills in many blanks. These grey areas and in between states are of interest to me."

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Review of A Forest in the Winnipeg Free Press
"A Forest collects new work by Sylvia Matas, whose recent drawing- and text-based work is a subtle, cerebral, poetic and highly personal exploration of natural phenomena and individual experience."

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Article in Border Crossings Magazine
"If time and space are the coordinates that shape the book, sight and sound are the senses that provide its content. Many of the charts she included are registers of sound, and the range is personal, natural and cosmological."

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Exhibition Essay for solo exhibition Red Shift at Mercer Union
"In Matas' practice, it is the nothing- the familiar objects, the empty spaces, the invisible- that, through simple gestures, become something to articulate the virtually inexplicable."

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Exhibition Essay for group exhibition Scratching the Surface: The Post–Prairie Landscape at Plug In ICA
"There is innate poetry in nameless passage. In conversation with the imperfect science of the sundial and hourglass, this is time-keeping without accompanying purpose- measured carefully outside any form of practical application."