/ Anatomy of Fatigue / Solo exhibition now at The Common Well Gallery


How do we understand our body through action? How do we perceive another body through theirs? Contemporary artist Matthew Thorley engages in a crossdisciplinary performance-based practice that interrogates the limits of the body in the face of failure. Anchored by the residual traces of action, Thorley’s body of work provides viewers an aftermath where gestures can be recreated and recited. His body is a mark-making tool: impressions in clay filled with creamy white liquid silicone, charcoal scuffs and smears of various body parts pressed against a white wall, a mesmerizing video in which Thorley and his collaborator, Hallie Maxwell, overlay tape to embrace the boundaries they encounter.

What if, I wonder, the body was a place? A place that can only be uncovered in the wake of physical exertion?

In his performance Anatomy of Fatigue, Thorley navigates failure as a poetic dimension that reveals the unconscious–a place accessible only through the collision between the artist and limitation. The actions pull from Thorley’s background as a professional athlete: an accelerated ricochet, a standing jump, the swinging of a weighted rope, a muddy nuzzle into the room’s corners–body rubbing against wall.

The gestures are at once ritualistic and Sisyphian. To what end is the body pushed to endure fatigue? Created during a time where “self-care” is a monetized industry used as a temporary salve for the exhausted, traumatized, and endangered body. The artist runs the opposite direction: exaggerating fatigue as a strategy to understand the anatomy of identity. Thorley endeavors not to provide conclusive answers but rather prompt questions about the capacity of endurance to transform our understanding of bodies through their (inevitable) failure.

/ Marc La Pointe /


Marc La Pointe (he/him) navigates the ephemerality of place through an art practice that responds to encounters with memory, material, and body. His varied sculptural approach includes performance, casting, assemblage, and collaborative community engagement. Currently, Marc supports the Art Department at Eastern Washington University as Lecturer.