Amused Medusa is an exhibition of new work on paper by Matthew Bakkom

Amused Medusa is a visual explication of the phenomena of the anagram, a word
whose constituent letters can be reordered to create an entirely new word historically
unrelated to the original. The occurrence of these linguistic gems is fundamentally
accidental, the result of coincidence alone, yet their consideration as ordered pairs
suggest intriguing new spaces of potential meaning for each audience member to
contemplate. Hustling Sunlight (2015) shared an expansive collection of these artifacts
in minimal, graphic style. This exhibition returns to that script inspired by Dutch grocery
store flower displays to push further through the creation of a much richer and optically
saturated context. The linear parameters of each piece are based on a set of children’s
stencils stumbled upon in Glendale Queens during the winter of 2025. All work in the
exhibition was produced over the course of the last year first in Rotterdam and then
subsequently in Minneapolis and New Orleans and made possible through the
hospitality of many friends and colleagues along the way to whom I offer my sincere
gratitude.

I was originally introduced to the phenomena of the anagram and its compelling
implications in the twilight of the 20 th century by a great teacher and close friend, Marie
Mueller, to whom I proudly dedicate this show, newly manifest and presented at long
last in her beloved New York City.

Matthew Bakkom (b.1968) has worked primarily in Minneapolis and New York since the
early 1990’s as both a visual artist and organizer of large scale conceptually driven
projects such as the New York City Museum of Complaint (2006-2009). He is the
creator of the method of Collective Investigation, a founding member of La Vista the
Downtown Cinema Club, The Canal Street Historical Society and All Star Fine and
Recorded Arts. He has appeared previously at the Susan Lipani Gallery where he
presented The Evil Genius of A King (2015). This 60 piece exhibition featured physical
facsimiles of select elements from a 35mm art teaching slide collection that had been
discarded by a midwestern university.