Tony Matelli's art is disobedient. One might even call it impudent. It is the work of a trickster skilled in revelatory illusions, a keen manipulator of the restless mediation between metaphor and truth. Threaded through Matelli's growing oeuvre is a set of distinctive concerns: in exploring unexpected cultural (and thereby artistic) limitations; and in depicting, as he puts it, "things finding a wayward means of survival." Things and the ideas that inform them. A few years ago, Matelli cast several small pieces based on fugitive objects- an apple core and bits of detritus- to examine "how little a sculpture could be, how debased it could become." Another tidy sculpture, Fuck the Rich (1997), pushes the inquiry into form and meaning further by way of a cast spider plant. Through the precise artifice of sharply delineated simulation, Matelli transformed the most prosaic of domestic flora, the kind held captive in hanging baskets everywhere, into a provocative objet d'art. Matelli is known for work that pushes boundaries: of convention, content and taste, meaning and material. Still, his sculpture always remains recognizable as such. "Sculpture's requisite three-dimensionality is forever haunted by the specter of resemblance to ordinary things," the artist and critic Mary Kelly reminds us. Matelli expands sculpture's relationship to the ordinary, relying on the crisp language of figurative realism, yet monkeying around with the meaning of appearances to unsettling effect. Lost and Sick (1996), features a life-size trio of Boy Scouts puking in a forest clearing, as though undone by the credo "always be prepared." Very, Very First Man: Necessary Alterations (1998-99), depicts two early primates rejecting their imminent evolution, trying desperately to re-attach the bloodied tails they've lost in the process. In both pieces, Matelli twists the traditional conventions of the natural history diorama into oblique social commentary on the perils of the human condition. Matelli's artistic language is an idiomatic hybrid, deriving as much from the radical experiments of "postmodern" art as from popular commercial culture: it is indebted to the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, which challenged art's aesthetic and social limits; and to conceptualist and minimalist explorations of art's formal and contentual bounds, as well as to the mischievous ironies and layered references of hip-hop culture. Ideal Woman (1998-99) materializes a vulgar bit of Pop culture in hyperrealistic terms: a 4-foot tall, flat-headed, toothless woman with oversized ears, standing amid empty beer bottles and cigarette butts, beckoning warmly. Through this figure, wrought strangely lifelike by eerie verisimilitude, a sexist joke is transformed into an object of anthropological and moral inquiry. Matelli also brings into question the usual assumptions about meaning, representation, and the art object's status- as estranged from the real world, and as fetish. Matelli consistently depicts things in transition between seemingly fixed states of meaning and more amorphous truths- emotional, psychological, moral, and cultural. "Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions," said Frederich Nietzsche; "they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force." Matelli's work is sexy, recapturing the risky indeterminacy of meaning as it takes shape in metaphor and illusion. In Abandon, the artist's first site-specific installation, created for the Lightwell Gallery, Matelli uses weeds to explore metaphor and meaning. The project is deceptively simple, playful, and elegant in its subtlety. Weeds are a particularly apt vehicle for Matelli, since their truth is entirely metaphorical, deriving from relations vested in culture rather than in nature. To define a plant as "weed" is an act of cultural valuation, a judgment of one life form as pernicious, useless, and irritating, by comparison to others deemed desirable, productive, and valuable. Moreover, environmental historian Frieda Knobloch asserts that "the history of weeds is the history of man," since "weeds go where people go, whether by human design or not." Because of the close link between human and weed life, weeds are subject to endless anthropomorphism; it is as though the weed is unknowable in its own right, existing primarily through metaphor. In this, the meaning of weeds is entirely contingent on environment and perception. Matelli cast his specimens in PVC, a clever material choice since weeds are renowned for their "plasticity," their stubborn adaptability to any environment. Weeds are shrewd survivalists, and as such carry metaphoric weight. Cast as sets of multiples, Matelli's weeds are differentiated by delicate surface treatments in paint. As is true of real weeds, their singularity- their meaning- resides in and expands through multiplication. Matelli chooses the most tenacious sorts of weeds, a maverick plant life resistant to human intention and continuously thwarting efforts at eradication. Weeds are vital and persistent, yet also carry the taint of failure; they mark abandonment, dissolution, and rejection. Weeds manage, as Matelli puts it, to be "waste and life at the same time." Weeds are markers along the paths of culture- of cultivation and its failure- and their sculptural representation carries social and political charge, however ambiguous. Transformed by concept, process, multiplication and representation, Matelli's weeds are vessels of indeterminate meaning, open to a variety of simultaneous interpretations. Waving lightly in the gallery's forced air, as life redesigned through the malleable promise of plastic, Matelli's weeds exist in a shifting space between reality and artifice. They seem to be one thing, yet mean something else altogether. Matelli's weeds are object-metaphors, wayward things that regain "sensuous force" as they are revealed to be illusory. Planted against the unique two-story verticality of the Lightwell Gallery, Matelli's weeds pose a witty challenge to perspective. The space commands an extreme upward gaze, yet the weeds demand concentrated attention at ground level. Scale, of course, is a key to perception. On close examination, from a seated vantage point, distinct weeds blur into a forest of abstract colors and repeating shapes. In Abandon, formal concerns and oblique social critique entwine; meaning is indeterminate, but the work is absolutely lucid. Matelli says forthrightly that his weeds constitute "an art installation that does not at all resemble art." His project statement slides gamely between metaphor, illusion and truth, both informing and obscuring meaning: it illuminates the project as a suggestive comment on the elliptical nature of culture and art. We all try to keep up appearances. We all operate within certain conventions, but we can't control everything. Sometimes we smell and look like shit. Gas gets passed and pimples unexpectedly come. We can accept all of these things so long as they are maintained. Once maintenance ends, subversion begins. Weeds are the horticultural equivalent of a zit. They represent a breakdown, either a failure or refusal to fight the perfunctory battle against entropy. One weed is a forgivable blemish. Overgrowth is hopeless abandon. Overgrowth inside is the cultivation of abandonment, a rewriting of rules. The celebration of failure. Matelli predicates Abandon on a riddle, for how can predetermined failure actually fail, or exist meaningfully as failure? Failure is for Matelli a poetic and philosophical point of departure, the place from which a "rewriting of rules" begins again. The predisposition of failure allows for experiment, expanding opportunity rather than narrowing the limits of possibility. Matelli's object-play in the fields of cultural meaning brings to mind the Fluxus agenda, which cloaked social critique in what looked like high-art pranksterism. An enduring conceptual and experimental influence on contemporary art, the Fluxus legacy is evident in attitude rather than specific interests or material orientations. As critic Peter Frank remarks, it remains "as a sensibility, fusing radical social attitudes with ever evolving aesthetic practices." It is no longer a matter of yelling, it's a matter of mattering! But how to matter? Perhaps in any way, not at all! In a certain way then? Not that either! What then? What is to do, is to create acts, gestures absurd in appearance, but in reality full of meaning.... Matelli's work is simpatico with the sensibility expressed in these words, spoken at one of the first Fluxus performance gatherings. How does one make art that really matters, that makes meaning differently, that responds in new and relevant ways to the present moment? Matelli relies on amalgamation, a seamless fascination with art and everyday life, a profound sense of the seriousness of play. Matelli's work is infused with irony, but remains guileless and untainted by facile cynicism. Instead, it expresses a kind of radical optimism, a reinfusion of art with vitality and depth. As Abandon is installed in the Lightwell Gallery, a symbolic citadel of cultural cultivation becomes a breeding ground for weedy meanings- truths that elude us just as we think we've got them yanked tight. It is this sort of punning unpredictability, a smart-ass conglomeration of wily humor and cultural politics that is Tony Matelli's distinction. Matelli's is an astute brand of cultural sampling, manifest in art that embodies the indeterminacy of meaning. It is art that escapes, art that gets away. Tony Matelli holds a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan (1995). His recent solo exhibitions include: Basilico Fine Arts (NYC), Galerie Andrehn Schiptjenko (Stockholm, Sweden), and Ten in One Gallery (Chicago). Matelli's work also has been show in a variety of group exhibitions, at venues including the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, the Aldrich Museum, and the Center for Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Village Voice, Art in America, Art Papers, New Art Examiner, and Flash Art, among other publications.