The Nightmare Before Christmas
Frank’s Chop Shop
127 East Ave.
Dec 2, 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Stop by Frank’s Chop Shop this First Friday for The Nightmare Before Christmas, an exhibition of works by Matthew Tully Dugan.

Matthew Tully Dugan (b. 1986) is a New York born and based multidisciplinary artist. The artist’s interests span celebrity, psychology, pop iconography, privacy, and fanaticism. Dugan often employs promotional, social, and found imagery in a practice motivated by digital media’s physical and emotional divide. His paintings, sculptures, installations, texts, and curatorial projects collapse the popular and the subcultural, the collective and the personal, as a means of processing contemporary conditions and their impact on the psyche.

From the artist: “I found myself in Hong Kong at the height of the highly disruptive and violent protests that had begun 6 months earlier in the fall of 2019. I was there to help archive the work of my friend Matthew who had taken his life just a month prior, a tragic and unexpected event that was felt deeply not only by his close friends and family but the art world at large. I was there to work alongside Matthew’s mother collecting and documenting the massive archive of works he’d left behind and I knew that emotions would be running high. The state of the uprisings there were also growing increasingly tense with a central area of conflict being just a few blocks from our hotel. Everything felt on edge. When we arrived you could see that the sidewalks had been torn up, bricks removed and stacked up as obstacles in the street to disrupt traffic as they attempted to cause stress to the city’s infrastructure. Angry graffiti littered the buildings. The protestors typically moved quickly and at random to various activation sites to avoid the oppositional army of “raptor” police that were on high alert, moving en masse to different locations like a sadistic head-game of political cat and mouse. You never knew if you might end up being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Read the rest of Matthew’s statement here.