I use computers to question some of the things I make with cameras.
I believe in photography’s ability to touch truth, but less so in our placing of importance on it having some kind of indexical relationship to what’s “real.”
My work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, SLATE, GUP Magazine, FLAK photo, Conscientious Photography Magazine, Doubletake Magazine, Contact Sheet, Afterimage, Fotophile, In the Loupe, and other publications. I have exhibited work nationally and internationally, and I graduated from Princeton University (where I studied Ethics and the Philosophy of Value) and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (where I completed an MFA in Photography and Digital Imaging). I was on the faculty at Amherst College, Bowdoin College, Ramapo College, The University of Connecticut, The University of Massachusetts Boston, Middlesex College, and The Community College of Rhode Island. I am the recipient of a J.William Fulbright Scholar Grant and the Ruttenberg Arts Foundation Award for the best new work nationally in photographic portraiture.
As The Institute of Network Cultures’ Dunja Nešović writes: “PrtScn: The Lazy Art of Screenshot gathered more than 30 authors in an aim to collectively explore the omnipresent, yet somehow often overlooked, screenshot as a contemporary digital image and practice that fuses the human and machinic boundaries of authorship and vision. As the screenshot travels through networks and is stored away safely in the depths of our hard drives or cloud depositories, a collection of written and visual works featured in PrtScn unpacks these digital movements, freezes and many points (and pixels) in between.”
The zine PrtScn: The Lazy Art of Screenshot gathered more than 30 authors in an aim to collectively explore the omnipresent, yet somehow often overlooked, screenshot as a contemporary digital image and practice that fuses the human and machinic boundaries of authorship and vision. As the screenshot travels through networks and is stored away safely in the depths of our hard drives or cloud depositories, a collection of written and visual works featured in PrtScn unpacks these digital movements, freezes and many points (and pixels) in between.
Apart from its print (and PDF) edition, PrtScn: The Lazy Art of Screenshot also features a small collection of moving image works that can be visited on this link.
Contributors: Aisha Altenhofen, Chloë Arkenbout, Nima Bahrehmand, Elisa Bergel Melo, Elki Boerdam, Paolo Bruzzo, Lele Buonerba and Laurel Hauge, Jessie Connell, Joana Chicau, Ioanna Digenaki, Megan Dieudonné & Andrea Rüthel, Rebecca Edwards, César Escudero Andaluz, @lbert figurt, Ben Grosser, Gottfried Haider, Roc Herms, Josh Kimball, Nicole Kouts, Olia Lialina, lu, Gabriel Menotti, Maxwell Neely-Cohen, Yoana Pavlova, Georgica Jane Pettus, Ulrich Richtmeyer, Laurence Scherz, Maša Seničić, Zach Shipko, Molly Soda, Matthew Swarts, Agnieszka Wodzińska, F. C. Zuke
Copy editors: Laurence Scherz, Chloë Arkenbout
Cover and publication design: Maria van der Togt
Production: Maria van der Togt, Tommaso Campagna, Dunja Nešović
Website design: Jordi Viader Guerrero
Binding: Canon Business Services, Canon Nederland N.V.
Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2022
“Matthew Swarts has engaged in the neurology of networked computing and photography, warping information and idling in digitized distortions and chromatic discord,” writes Stephen Frailey (EDITOR, DEAR DAVE,). “The work reveals a romanticism that seems atypical for an involvement with technology. The photographs are a lattice of powdery transparency, delicately layering membranes of thin color.” (https://deardeavemagazine.com)
Dear Matthew,
After much unexpected delay, and then more, Dear Dave, 28 will be released next week. The issue will be announced on IG around Wednesday, and shipped on Friday. Thank you for your patience with the wait.
I am happy to inform you that we have used one of your images on the cover, as attached. I hope that you will find this agreeable; I think it perfectly announces the intention of the magazine to suggest new forms of photographic thinking and practice. And it is unlike any previous cover!
Please send me a postal address so that I can send copies to you. And I hope that all has been well in these last few months. On to the future!
I am delighted that the jury of the 2018 Photographic Museum of Humanity Grant (composed of Roger Ballen, Genevieve Fussell, Emilia Van Lynden, and Monica Allende) shortlisted The Alternatives! Best wishes to all competitors and sincerest thanks for the honor and earnest consideration by the jury.
Two views of C, 2018. From the series: The Alternatives. http://matthewswarts.com/portfolio/alternatives/
I am honored to have work from The Alternatives included in this beautiful new international online exhibition by Magali Avezou at the Photographic Museum of Humanity. https://phmuseum.com/exhibition/immanence
“What we say being an image, a semblance, is what without being really non-existent, doesn’t exist nevertheless.” Clément Rosset.
An image as a screen, a mirror, an illusion. A photograph as a surface, a superficies, a jumble of data pretending to reveal something.
The contemporary omnipresence of images has transformed the way we communicate. Photographs are ubiquitous, constantly circulating and transferring some kind of information. Which ones exactly, I am not sure we know.
Indeed, photography has been the modernist tool of excellence for an age that believed in science, objectivity and rationality. In post-modernity or the post-truth era, can photography still be a medium able to reflect upon our time? To translate what so often is withdrawn from our sight, hidden, concealed from public knowledge? To communicate the sensorial, the intangibility of feelings, the ambivalence of perception?
This exhibition proposes a look at artists using photography to reflect upon the ambiguity of vision. In their research, they twist the representative nature of the image to explore what is not visible. They look at themes such as the complication of communicating, the fleeting affects, the fragmentation of experiences, political secrets, prostitution, the relationship to our inner body, visual love, and social conventions.
The idea of surface is central to this selection: surface of the photograph, of the visible, of the viewable; surface that separates the outside from the inside, the public sphere from the private one; surface that conceals and creates meaning through interferences. Surface as a point of contact where things might happen.
Surface like a skin, the deepest thing in men, as Paul Valery would say.
I am completely honored to announce that the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York has acquired two prints from The Alternatives for the museum’s permanent collection. The museum purchased Untitled, 2015, and Untitled, 2016 (pictured below). Special thanks to Lisa Hostetler, Curator-In-Charge, who organized A Matter of Memory, the exhibition which featured these works, and to Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, for arranging this sale.
Super excited to share some preliminary images from my new book project, The Alternatives (2017). Special thanks to Katherine Oktober Matthews of GUP Magazine (The Netherlands), who nominated this project for consideration for MACK’s First Book Award in London, UK!
The Alternatives (2017), Hardcover Dummy (In Progress!)
The Relationship Show explores four artists’ viewpoints on the beginning, end, and isolation within current relationships. Each artist approaches the topic utilizing multiple approaches that meet us emotionally, visually, and with bittersweet laughter.
The most important role an artist plays is the way in which they reflect back to the world something intimate about themselves. Art has the power to demonstrate love, passion, and joy. Conversely, it reveals uncertainty, discomfort, pain, and breakdown. Making art about relationships can be the most honest way to work through feelings of turmoil and disconnection. The origin of the artwork is personal, but the experience is universal. The photographs of Laura Beth Reese are a conscious look back at her relationships that have ended, and an attempt at reconnection with an intimacy that has passed. Maureen Drennan photographs her husband with love and sensitivity in an attempt to reconnect and understand the turmoil in her marriage brought about by his depression.
Utilizing the language of popular culture adds universality to a project. Matthew Swarts takes our relationship with technology and amplifies the visual artifacts while simultaneously breaking our connection with the original image with two projects; each addressing the end of one relationship and the uncertainty that comes at the beginning of another. Allison Wade is borrowing the language of text messaging and the way that online dating relationships play out remotely with disastrous results. Her paintings of break-up texts demonstrate the frustrations, rising disregard for emotions, along with the desperation that has developed in a contemporary dating culture.
So honored to be in this exhibition honoring Paul Kopeikin’s tireless 25th years of being a gallerist in Los Angeles!
Exhibition on view November 5th with special hours 11:00 AM – 8:00 PM
Panel Discussion and Reception on November 19th
2:00 PM Panel Discussion “Photography’s Place in a Contemporary Collection” with guest speakers Tarrah von Lintel, Carol Lee Brosseau, Paul Kopeikin and others.
5:00-8:00 PM 25th Anniversary Reception
Since 1991, Kopeikin Gallery has presented well over 200 exhibitions of photography, painting and works on paper. The 25th Anniversary exhibition will focus on photography presenting a selection of artists from past exhibitions by the early masters of the medium to contemporary artists from the gallery’s current program including:
This is the raw video feed coming out of an HTC Vive Headset while someone walks inside Edgecombe One (2016), a room-sized experience I am building for Virtual Reality (VR). Over the past several months I have been falling in love with the tools and experiences offered in VR/AR (Augmented Reality), and with the help of a few wonderful friends, I’ve been exploring the idea of making art for virtual experiences.
What’s fascinating to me about experimenting in virtual reality is that you are actually on the inside of something that is made for you to explore at will. Instead of looking at something carefully arranged in a distinct space, the space is all around you, created by the artist, and you may be experiencing it anywhere locally. In VR the dynamic between the viewer and the object is really rearranged interestingly. The art moves through the viewer while the viewer moves through the art.
In this piece, I’ve collected small digital artifacts from an iPhone. Inside Unity (a video game editing software suite) I made spherical video textures that play and rotate on transparent spheres moving and re-scaling according so some simple math inputs about a sine wave that creates the “breathing” of the objects three dimensionally. In this case, I have been making things in my studio specifically for the HTC Vive, but this piece is easily transcribable to other platforms.
Look for more updates on my fascination with VR soon!
Thomas Barrow, Mladen Bizumic, Matthew Brandt, Marco Breuer, Antony Cairns, Ellen Carey, Phil Chang, John Chiara, Adam Fuss, Bryan Graf, Robert Heinecken, Leslie Hewitt, Kenneth Josephson, Farrah Karapetian, Jason Lazarus, Laura Letinsky, Jim Lommasson, Lilly Lulay, Nick Marshall, Chris McCaw, Diane Meyer, Yola Monakhov Stockton, Vik Muniz, Floris Neusьss, Marlo Pascual, Matthew Porter, Alison Rossiter, Taryn Simon, Michelle Stuart, Kuniй Sugiura, Matthew Swarts, Bertien van Manen, James Welling, Melanie Willhide and Augusta Wood.
A most special and sincere thanks to Lisa Hostetler, Curator in Charge, for including my work in this exciting exhibition.
Untitled, 2016. From the series: The Alternatives. 24.75×33″, archival inkjet mounted to dibond.
From the exhibition text:
“With the convenience and ubiquity of computers and smartphones, the majority of photographic images are being recorded digitally rather than on film. As this transformation has broadened access to photographic images—both in making and in viewing—in many contexts it has also obviated the need for photographic prints. Snapshooters, photojournalists, and commercial photographers rarely produce material objects as the final step in their process. As a consequence, photographs in the form of image-bearing sheets of paper are scarce outside of the art world.
Because personal and collective memories are so inextricably intertwined with photographs—the result of the medium’s progressive saturation of everyday life for the past century and a half—this revolutionary change in the production and dissemination of photographic images is altering society’s relationship to memory.
In the midst of this change, many contemporary photographers are making work that addresses, either directly or obliquely, the potential consequences of the medium’s metamorphosis. Some artists dig deep into photographic materials as though searching for the locus of memory, while others incorporate found snapshots into their work as virtual talismans of recollection. Both kinds of work highlight the presence of the photographic object and function as self-conscious meditations on photography’s ongoing reorganization of our mental and physical landscape.”
A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age is generously sponsored by Deborah Ronnen and Sherman Levey.
Exhibition Preview
Friday October 21, 6-8p
Curator’s remarks at 6p, Cash bar and light refreshments
Reservations required: (585) 234-6064
Panel Discussion: Matter and Memory in the Digital Age
Saturday, October 22, 1p
With James Welling, Marco Breuer, and Diane Meyer. Afterward, join Phil Chang in the galleries as he replaces his unfixed prints with new ones that will fade in a matter of hours. Free to members; included with museum admission.
It is an honor and a great pleasure to have work from The Alternatives featured in Fraction Magazine’s Issue 89 with an interesting group including work by fellow artists Amy Friend, Puspa Lohmeyer, and Kourtney Roy. My sincere thanks to Assistant Editor Bree Lamb and Editor David Bram!
A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age
Published by George Eastman Museum
Foreword by Bruce Barnes. Text by Lisa Hostetler, William T. Green.
The majority of photographic images today are recorded and viewed digitally, rather than on film and paper. Amateurs, photojournalists and commercial photographers alike rarely produce material objects as the final step in their photographic process, making photographs in the form of physical objects increasingly scarce.
But what happens to personal and collective memories when photographic images are not instantly accessible on the face of physical objects? How is society’s relationship to memory changing as digital photographs become the norm?
A number of contemporary artists are making work that suggests the potential consequences of photography’s latest metamorphosis. Two main strategies emerge: some artists dig deep into photographic materials as though searching for the locus of memory, and others incorporate found photographs into their work as virtual talismans of recollection. Both highlight the presence of the photographic object and function as self-conscious meditations on photography’s ongoing reorganization of our mental and physical landscape. A Matter of Memory features the work of more than 30 artists including Thomas Barrow, Matthew Brandt, Ellen Carey, John Chiara, Adam Fuss, Robert Heinecken, Leslie Hewitt, Kenneth Josephson, Laura Letinsky, Chris McCaw, Diane Meyer, Yola Monakhov Stockton, Vik Muniz, Floris Neusüss, Marlo Pascual, Matthew Porter, Taryn Simon, Michelle Stuart, Kunié Sugiura, Bertien van Manen, James Welling and Augusta Wood.
Delighted to among such amazing company in Der Greif: A Process 2.0:
DER GREIF has been invited by Lars Willumeit, curator of the Krakow Photomonth 2016 Main Program – »Crisis? What Crisis?!« – to perform A Process 2.0 during the opening weekend at the festival centre.
A Process 2.0 questions photography in its digital form as a distinct medium, its handling with the use of the Internet as well as photography’s haptic stimuli and common perception of authorship. A Process 2.0 is using the World Wide Web’s participatory structure to connect participants, visitors and editors across national boundaries – made possible due to an online transmission of the performative exhibition. A Process 2.0 is the continuation of A Process – Ein Prozess, first performed over the course of two months at Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus, Augsburg, in 2014.
My most sincere thanks to Lisa Hostetler, Curator-in-charge, Department of Photography, at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, for including five pieces from The Alternatives in her upcoming exhibition “A Matter of Memory”. (October 22, 2016–January 29, 2017, in the Museum’s Main Galleries).
I will look forward to posting more about this exhibition as the date approaches.
From the exhibition concept:
With the convenience and ubiquity of computers and smartphones, the majority of photographic images are being recorded digitally rather than on film. As this transformation has broadened access to photographic images—both in making and in viewing—in many contexts it has also obviated the need for photographic prints. Snapshooters, photojournalists, and commercial photographers rarely produce material objects as the final step in their process. As a consequence, photographs in the form of image-bearing sheets of paper are scarce outside of the art world.
Because personal and collective memories are so inextricably intertwined with photographs—the result of the medium’s progressive saturation of everyday life for the past century and a half—this revolutionary change in the production and dissemination of photographic images is altering society’s relationship to memory.
In the midst of this change, many contemporary photographers are making work that addresses, either directly or obliquely, the potential consequences of the medium’s metamorphosis. Some artists dig deep into photographic materials as though searching for the locus of memory, while others incorporate found snapshots into their work as virtual talismans of recollection. Both kinds of work highlight the presence of the photographic object and function as self-conscious meditations on photography’s ongoing reorganization of our mental and physical landscape.
Super excited to share SLIDELUCK GLOBAL's presentation of The Alternatives. If you've ever been curious about what I've been up to for the past year this short video slideshow is a good introduction. It was shown at both SLIDELUCK BOSTON and SLIDELUCK Bydgoszcz, Poland in 2015.
The Alternatives is a series in which I layer found information from the internet over personal photographs of my partner. I use the computer and a printer to extend my questions about the things I make with cameras. Using pieces of digitized information, I weave, disintegrate, filter, and layer visual data over the images I make from life. While the pictures depict intimate visions of my partner, they are also about how photography may confuse, challenge, mediate, extend, and even negate perception.
I am truly delighted to announce my participation in Kopeikin Gallery’s installation at Pulse Miami Beach in conjunction with Art Basel Miami Beach 2015. With kindest thanks to Paul Kopeikin, whose steadfast belief in my work this past year has been truly transformative and nurturing.
So proud and honored to have work going up as part of Kopeikin Gallery’s installation at UNSEEN PHOTO FAIR, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 18th-20th 2015. Sincere and sustained thanks to Paul Kopeikin!
Kopeikin Gallery @ UNSEEN Photo Fair, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Kopeikin Gallery @ UNSEEN Photo Fair, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Kopeikin Gallery @ UNSEEN Photo Fair, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Thrilled and honored to have been included in Maria Teresa Salvati’s Multimedia Presentation as part of SLIDELUCK GLOBAL‘s participation in the TRIENNIAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY HAMBURG. Featuring artists: Amy Elkins, Andi Schreiber, Boris Eldagsen, Dougie Wallace, Jean-marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni, Kirsty Mackay, Marcela Magno, Marika Dee, Matthew Swarts, Paula Teller, Rafael Arocha, Spike Johnson. June 23, 2015. Container City, Hamburg, Germany.
Very excited to announce the publication of my work in GUP Magazine #45 Evolution out of The Netherlands. Special and sincere thanks to Katherine October Matthews for discovering my work and publishing this portfolio and interview!
From the supporting text for GUP #45/EVOLUTION:
“Change alone is unchanging,” spoke the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. And so it goes. Nearly 2500 years after his death, our world is incomprehensibly changed but the truth of his statement holds steady. In GUP#45, we look at the way things change over time: evolution. Whether the evolution of mankind, or ideas or photography, we observe the constant element of change.
This issue features an interview with Magnum photographer Alec Soth, who first achieved success through a self-published book but has gone on to produce many books through renowned publishing houses as well as his own company Little Brown Mushroom, a long-read article by Editor-at-Large Erik Vroons and articles by Lorne Darnell and Chief Editor Katherine Oktober Matthews.
Additional photographers highlighted in the magazine include: Christian Berthelot, Regula Bochsler, Natan Dvir, Joan Fontcuberta, Dave Imms, IOCOSE, Brandon Juhasz, Yann Mingard, Fernando Moleres, Swen Renault, Jan Rosseel, Matthew Swarts, Danila Tkachenko, among others.”
So elated to announce my participation in NEW GIFTS, The Creative Technologies Exhibition at Macy Gallery, part of the Art and Education Program at Columbia University, Teacher’s College. 525 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027.
June 1 – 26, 2015. Opening reception June 19, 5-7pm.
From the exhibition announcement:
“NEW GIFTS’ is an exhibition showcasing the work of contemporary artists who push digital and emerging technologies beyond their functional capacity into the realm of the metaphor. Featured artists work at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and humanities; and employ technology as a catalyst for artistic expression, storytelling, or cultural exchange.”
My most sincere thanks to Richard Jochum, Sean Justice, and Paul Kopeikin for making this exhibition of my work possible.
Special thanks to Rasmus Vasli for discovering and graciously publishing my work this morning on Sweden’s Floret magazine. It is a wonderful honor to have the opportunity to bring Scandinavian audiences to my work!
“Matthew Swartshas a current exhibition at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles that runs through April 18th featuring two projects, Bethand Alternatives. With both projects, Matthew reconsiders photographic memory by altering photographs that have personal resonance. Initially, his series Beth was an intimate portrait exploration of his partner. After the relationship ended, the photographs were evidence of their bond, but he was no longer connected to the images in the same way. Matthew began to alter the images by layering on visual abstractions resulting in a re-imagining of Beth and a new series, The Alternatives. This unusual approach to portraiture considers how the loss of love echoes the loss of visual information, but in the end the memory is still there.
Matthew’s work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, SLATE, FLAK photo, Conscientious Photography Magazine, Doubletake Magazine, Contact Sheet, Afterimage,Fotophile, In the Loupe, and other publications. He graduated from Princeton University and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and has taught photography at Amherst College, Bowdoin College, Ramapo College, The University of Connecticut, The University of Massachusetts, Boston, Middlesex College, and The Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He is the recipient of a J.William Fulbright Scholar Grant and the Ruttenberg Arts Foundation Award for the best new work nationally in photographic portraiture. His work is represented by Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles.”
I am completely thrilled to announce my participation in Kopeikin Gallery’s installation at the 2015 AIPAD Photography Show at The Park Avenue Armory in New York City, April 16th-April 19th 2015! Special thanks to Paul Kopeikin.
Please stop by Kopeikin Gallery’s booth at the show to visit with me and the work!
Incredibly honored to be included amongst photographic educators in the New England area showing work in Paula Tognarelli’s and Frances Jakubek’s [Photo]gogues 2015:, part of the FLASH FORWARD BOSTON festival!
Slideluck is teaming up with Boston Cyberarts to bring you the first SLIDELUCK Boston! Join us on Saturday, April 11th at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge for our “Technology & Art” themed show.This show’s curator is Stephanie Dvareckas, the Assistant Director of Boston Cyberarts.
Featured artists:
Michael Zachary * Elaine Bay * Raul Gonzalez * Joe DiFazio * Matthew Swarts
Amanda King * Rene Dongo * Coorain Devin * Clint Baclawski * Dennis Miller
Chris Fitch * Ian MacLellan and Jennifer Berglund * Michael Lewy
Corey Corcoran * Lina Giraldo * Dana Mueller * Jeffu Warmouth
Andrew Neumann * Gianna Stewart
SLIDELUCK Boston
Saturday | April 11th | 2015
6:00pm Potluck | 7:30pm Slideshow
Microsoft NERD Center | 1 Memorial Drive #1 | Cambridge, Massachusetts
I am thrilled to announce my first exhibition with Kopeikin Gallery (Los Angeles): Matthew Swarts: PROCESSING (Beth and the Alternatives), March 7th through April 18th, 2015. My most sincere thanks to Paul Kopeikin, whose collaboration and support for this work have made all things newly possible! Friends and followers near Los Angeles, please join me at Kopeikin Gallery, March 7th, 2015 (6-8pm) for the opening reception!
Matthew Swarts @ Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (March 7th – April 18th 2015)
Matthew Swarts @ Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (March 7th – April 18th 2015)
Matthew Swarts @ Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (March 7th – April 18th 2015)
Matthew Swarts @ Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (March 7th – April 18th 2015)
Matthew Swarts @ Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (March 7th – April 18th 2015)
Matthew Swarts @ Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (March 7th – April 18th 2015)
Matthew Swarts @ Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (March 7th – April 18th 2015)
Matthew Swarts @ Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (March 7th – April 18th 2015)
Matthew Swarts @ Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (March 7th – April 18th 2015)
Matthew Swarts @ Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (March 7th – April 18th 2015)
Brace yourself, Chicago! Slideluck is returning just in time for Valentine’s Day. Join us for another night of food, music, fun, and art on Friday, February 13th, 2015, at The Promontory in Hyde Park. SLIDELUCK Chicago IV promises to be an exciting one with Jane Beachy ofSalonathon taking the director’s helm. Pairing artwork with homemade treats, Slideluck is a New York City-based, non-profit arts organization that provides an opportunity for artists and arts-appreciators to come together for an unforgettable community event. In recognition of Valentine’s Day, the show’s theme is “Eat Your Heart Out.” From the carnal to the platonic, “happily ever-after” accounts to heart-wrenching tales of loss, we’ll be doing a little show-n’-tell about love.
Featured Artists:
Anna Williams * Bill Denison * Briana Finegan * Chance Bone * Christopher Schneberger
Claire Spaulding * Dav Yendler * Dietlinde Bamberger * Erica Simone * Jiayi Chen
Jon Lowenstein * Jordan Tiberio * Marc Falzon * María D´Amico
MaryBeth Stanton * Matthew Swarts * Monica Pedraja * Nick Azzaro
Rafael Soldi * Saviero Truglia * Tammy Mercure
Before and after the slideshow, there’ll be performances by Celine NEON, Tricky Ol’Puss, and Old Timey, along with a photobooth byGlitterGuts.
SLIDELUCK Chicago IV
Friday | February 13th | 2015
8:00pm Potluck | 9:30pm Slideshow | Music Before & After Slideshow
$5 Donation at Door | Free Admission with Potluck Dish
The Promontory | 65311 South Lake Park Ave West | Chicago, IL
Color photography and its relationship to the established art world have endured a charged and tenuous past. Nearly 50 years ago, William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, William Christenberry, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, propelled by the support of John Szarkowski and the Museum of Modern Art, helped encourage a larger embrace of color photography within the greater dialogue of fine art. While early 20th century photographers like Edward Steichen made significant moves to explore color’s experimental possibilities, Shore’s generation may have been the first to push it into wider acceptance beyond its traditional place as a commercial application. Their approach was largely descriptive, using color as a means of representing the world beyond black and white’s limited abilities.
Color’s next generation, which included Jeff Wall, Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Ruff and many others working in the late 1980’s onward, introduced a new level of excitement, one whose engagement with art history and conceptual art helped further enable a dialogue with the fine art world. In many cases these photographers challenged earlier generations’ use of color as factual description, and photography’s ability to accurately represent any notion of truth.
Using these two generations as a reference point, Radical Color looks to how contemporary art photographers have expanded upon these previous conversations. While pioneers like Shore may have used color as a means of achieving pure description, and the following generation challenged its truthfulness, the photographers in this exhibition are approaching color with an understanding of, and desire to build upon and run with its limitations. Their methods incorporate a range of techniques, both analogue and digital, but are linked by the influence of rapid technological shifts, a culture of non-stop online sharing, and an environment in which black and white photography no longer dominates.
Radical Color might appear to be a swarm of saturation and messy hues, an inward reference to photographic process, or an extension of “New Formalism” which has consistently riled critics on and offline for the past few years with its heightened attention to photographic process. Jessica Labatte and Justin Hodges’ work represent opposite extremes of this – Labatte’s with its abstracted manipulation of Photoshop tools, and Hodges, with its grotesque, large-scale photographic sculpture. Like many artists in this exhibition, their work is part of an ongoing question about the defining characteristics of the medium.
Color’s digital qualities have a unique role throughout much of Radical Color, as a new means for artificially unveiling the unexplainable, exploring uncertainty, distance, and escapism. In some cases these associations are deeply personal, and at times political or historical, while others address this with playful humor and wit. For example, Matthew Swarts’ deeply personal work uses digital layers of color to make sense of his past relationship, and as a metaphor for the ambiguities of memory and fading intimacy. Azikiwe Mohammed uses appropriated images from the Internet to create fictional, planetary landscapes, emphasizing his feelings of alienation as an African American from the canon of American history. Sadie Weschler uses a range of digital tools to manipulate natural landscapes, reflecting on how the land has been continuously shifted by human presence over centuries of human development.
The photographers included in Radical Color consistently use photography to demonstrate a more consciously subjective understanding of the world around them than preceding generations. Whether they are using film, digital processes or appropriating existing images, they are linked by a nebulous, continuously shifting period in photography’s history informed by constant sharing of images and ideas.
Really delighted to have this feature and interview about The Alternatives on Super Massive Black Hole Magazine! Special and kindest thanks to Barry Hughes!
Delighted and very honored to have my work featured on WIRED today. My most sincere thanks to Jakob Schiller (and Pete Brook) for writing about and believing in my work!
I am thrilled and honored to be a part of the conversation led by Jennifer Schwartz at Crusade for Art. This organization is incredible in its outreach and mission to unite creators with collectors, and Jennifer a tireless beacon for all artists. Thank you both to Jennifer and David Rosenberg of SLATE for making this connection!
Metropolitan Picture Framing recently interviewed me for their informative artist blog. I cannot thank Metroframe.com enough for the rapid but expert fabrication of my frames for Kopeikin Gallery’s installation at MIAMI PROJECT 2014. The craftsmanship and attention to detail is apparent in each hand-made frame. If you are looking for an elegant, beautifully crafted wooden frame solution for your exhibition prints, consider this company — their work is top notch!
Delighted to announce my first place selection by Ruben Natal San Miguel in RIPE art gallery’s WHATISAPORTRAIT? exhibition opening this Saturday, December 13, 2014. Special thanks to the tireless and fearless team of Ruben and RIPE’s owner, Cherie Via Rexer!
From the gallery:
“Ripe Art Gallery’s First Juried Photography Exhibition was an Open Call for entries of contemporary photography based works. This competition is juried/curated by Ruben Natal-San Miguel, photographer, writer, photography specialist/critic and curator. The curator was looking to see exceptional photography with a unique perspective and cohesive look based on a new look at portraiture. He challenged entrants to redefine what a portrait is. Our juror, who has his finger on the pulse of contemporary photography, pored over hundreds of entries to select 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Place Winners, 2 Honorable Mentions, and a group of winners for individual catagories.
Winners will be exhibited with Amy Elkins, Oliver Wasow, Nan Goldin, Aline Smithson, Ryan McGinley, Jack Pierson and 4 more great photographers!
Opening Reception on Saturday, December 13, 2014, 7-10pm! This Promises to be THE Show of the Year!!! Fabulous people, Valet Parking, Live dj Music from DJ Lombardo, and GREAT Photography!!!!!
Food Truck by Blondie’s Bakery for your snacks!”
1028 Park Avenue
Huntington, NY 11743
Tel: 631.239.1805
I am delighted to announce that my work will be shown by Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, California at MIAMI PROJECT (December 2-7, 2014) in the Wynwood District of midtown Miami.
I am thrilled and full of gratitude to have been invited by Eliot Dudik, Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of William and Mary, to participate in BREAKING GROUND, a blockbuster exhibition of photography featuring 110 national and international photographic artists!
from the text accompanying the exhibition:
On this 175th anniversary of the invention of photography, excitement and anticipation are stirring in the Department of Art & Art History at the College of William & Mary as we prepare to break ground on a new photography program, the first in the College’s long history. This dynamic new offering will engage students in dialog and practice as they study historic through contemporary developments in photography pushing the boundaries of photographic art making in the 21st century.
Inaugurating this celebration, the College has generously furnished the exhibition Breaking Ground: Contemporary Photography at the College of William & Mary, a collection of photographic artworks by 110 national and international artists, and accompanying catalog. The exhibition relays a sense of the vast breadth of contemporary photographic art with prints, handmade books, video art, assemblage, sculptural works, and installation. The possibilities afforded through the amalgamation of traditional and new technology, techniques, and materials are boundless.
David Emitt Adams, Smelter
The show’s variety is meant to reflect a basic principle of the new photography program – it is a celebration of photography as a liberal art, as an extension of the humanistic and critical discipline of art-making that has always been the foundation of our university. Photography at the College of William and Mary is not solely a technology; it is a vehicle of visual expression with a history of nearly two centuries. Our approach to it will therefore embrace its newest potentials and also grow out of its history, its historical techniques and processes, and its historical achievements, to integrate contemporary and future practices of photographic art at a deep level into William and Mary’s liberal arts tradition. This is what it means to call photography a new way, our newest way, of engaging humanistic thought.
Please join us in celebrating the College of William & Mary’s newest contribution.
Exhibition Details:
October 15-31, 2014
Opening Reception: October 17, 4-7 pm
Alumni Reception: October 18, 10am-12pm Andrews Hall
Matthew Swarts, La Reserva Curi Cancha, Monteverde, Costa Rica, 2014.
I had the deep pleasure of returning to Costa Rica after a twelve year absence, if only for a week this month. Much had changed in the years since I lived in Moravia on a Fulbright grant. I am delighted to have had an exquisite walk in the Curi Cancha Private Reserve in Monteverde’s cloud forest. Here are a few images to begin what I hope will be a much more comprehensive project.
“A woman stands against a gray sky, the low light of the sinking sun glints off her glasses. Her hair is in a bun. She is attractive, but not conventionally beautiful. It’s the same person in all the photographs, somehow, but she looks different in each one: soft-faced and girlish in one, sharp-nosed and intelligent in the next. Her face is often turned away or obscured, lost in thought. The colors are muted, but scrubbed clean. The settings are elemental, simple, and still — almost streamlined. This slightly eerie, indeterminate place could be the future. This is Beth.
Beth: It’s the name of a series of photographs that Matthew Swarts — a widely published Somerville, Massachusetts-based photographer trained at Princeton and Mass Art — calls a “portrait of partnership.” Though the name is ordinary, it has a ring to it. And so do these images in their melancholy manner. The photographs have some of the muted intensity of German painter Gerhard Richter’s portraits of his family and the sustained attention that American photographer Harry Callahan focused on Eleanor, his wife of over fifty years.
Swarts explains he and Beth became a couple around the time she became estranged from her parents because of her recent divorce even as Swarts’s own parents were divorcing. He says it added an “unusual weight” to their partnership — that they “became a sort of primary family to each other” and he wanted to express this, somehow, in photographs. It just so happens that Beth is also the word in Hebrew for “house” as in a kind of shelter, but also means family, as in “the house of so and so.”
The photos are not simply somber. They are sexy enough to stop you in your tracks, as you admire Beth’s long muscles and broad swimmer’s shoulders in the photograph where she stands alone and naked on the beach. These mysterious images of love exude a post-coital sadness that speaks intimacy more than desire. When the couple parted ways recently, Swarts, an ever-restless artist, started reworking some of the photographs, layering images of graph paper over the original “straight” photographs to obscure Beth’s face and acknowledge change. The woman we’ve become accustomed to looking at fades from flesh and blood into a kind of diagram, a map, or schema, perhaps, of how Beth is stored in Matthew’s brain. As Beth’s face flattens and whites out, we feel, and sharply, how impossible it is to reconstitute the full experience of love. The word for that is loss.” — Pelle Cass
I have been reworking images from the BETH series. All new images are scalable without a loss in resolution to 40 inches in width. Have a look: http://matthewswarts.com/projects/beth/
Delighted to belatedly learn that I am a finalist for the ONWARD Compe ’14 Exhibition at Project Basho in Philadelphia, PA! Exhibition opening at Project Basho on March 1, 2014!
I am honored and thrilled to share Stuart Pilkington’s ‘The Swap’ today with my good friend Tanit Sakakini! Special thanks to Tanit and Stuart for making this creative exchange possible!
The conversation about BETH continues today on Fototazo! Special thanks to Tom Griggs for his interest and generosity and compelling questions about the work. Please take a look!
“Here is Beth, photographed by her partner, Matthew Swarts. Of Beth we, meaning everybody except those who know this young woman in person, have a set of photographs and nothing else. What are we going to make of Beth now? What do these photographs tell us about her? What do they tell us about the photographer? What do they tell us about their relationship?
I don’t think there is a simple answer for any of these questions. This is exactly why the photographs are so compelling. In other words, Swarts’ selfishness has paid off. As a matter of fact, the picture at the very top obviously does not look like a straight photograph, and it isn’t. It’s a scan of a photograph emerging from a broken printer. Machines, of course, cannot be selfish (machines are always only stupid). But people using photographs coming out of broken machines can be.
And Beth, the project, shows how this all comes together, albeit in ways that have the process remain a mystery. That’s the other frustrating thing about portraiture: You will never learn it from other people, only from doing it yourself – however much was, is and will be written about it. These pictures show the same woman in a variety of ways that almost make it seem we’re looking at more than one person. Almost.
It is that “almost” that is crucial here, because in that “almost” lies the fact that while photography cannot literally depict someone’s inner state, it can still make a stab at it. Or rather: A photographer can make a stab at showing us her or (in this case) his idea of that other person’s inner state, which he has no direct access to, either (this is what makes life exciting – life on Vulcan must be perfectly boring).
In the end, what we are looking at then is not clear. All that added uncertainty is what defines photography. This is why machines will never be able to produce real art (the relentless hype by today’s tech fetishists notwithstanding): Machines don’t do uncertainty.”
Honored to have been selected by Sarah Kennel, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), to be a part of this exciting exhibition at Texas Woman’s University. Love this image of guests in front of Beth, Long Beach Island, New Jersey, 2012!
Delighted to be featured on emptystretch.com and pinned down mercilessly (and quite beautifully) by The Faceless Kid. Sincerest thanks to Jordan Swartz.
Sincerest thanks to Tom Griggs of Fototazo.com for asking me to write about my work in The Image, where photographers discuss a single image in relation to a larger body of work.
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Matthew Swarts, Untitled, 2014, from the series: The Alternatives.
