MATTHEW BRANDT
Press Pack
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
MATTHEW BRANDT
BORN 1982, Los Angeles, California Lives and works in Los Angeles
EDUCATION
2008 MFA | UCLA, Los Angeles, CA | Masters in Fine Arts: Specialization in Photography
2004 BFA | Cooper Union, New York, NY | Bachelors in Fine Arts
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2014 Praz-Delavallade, Paris (forthcoming, November) Process Priority, Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA Matthew Brandt: Sticky/Dust/West, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, VA Excavations, Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, NY Lakes and Reservoirs, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA
2013 Velvet and Bubble Wrap, M+B, Los Angeles, CA Matthew Brandt: Sticky/Dusty/Wet, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH
Water & Polaroid, Highlight Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2012 Lakes, Trees, and Honeybees, Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, NY
2011 Two Ships Passing, M+B, Los Angeles, CA
2009 Chocolate, Bees, Dust, Sperm, and Sprinkles, Cardwell Jimmerson Gallery, Culver City, CA
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2015 Light, Paper, Process, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA (forthcoming)
2014 Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City (forthcoming, November) Transformational Imagemaking: Handmade Photography Since 1960, Contemporary Photography and Visual Arts Center, Buffalo, NY Phantoms in the Dirt, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago Homeland [IN]security: Vanishing Dreams, Dorsky Gallery, Long Island City, NY The Fifth Season, James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY After Ansel Adams, Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, CA
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
NADA New York 2014, NY Beyond Earth Art, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Process, Photo Center Northwest, Seattle, WA Out of the Ordinary, The Bascom: Center for the Visual Arts, Highlands, NC Trouble with the Index, California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA What is a Photograph?, The International Center of Photography, New York, NY
2013 The Polaroid Years: Instant Photography and Experimentation, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida Reality Check, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA Currents: Photographs from the collection of Allen Thomas Jr., Contemporary Art Museum (CAM), Raleigh, NC Land Marks, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Reality Check, Bakalar & Paine Gallery, Boston, MA Dwelling in Erasure, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Unique, Von Lintel Gallery, New York, NY Rogue Wave, L.A. Louvre, Los Angeles, CA Staking Claim: A California Invitational, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA The Black Mirror, Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA 2012 After Image: The Photographic Process(ed), Cerritos College Art Gallery, Norwalk, CA Group Show in New Photography in Palma, Mallorca Landings, Palma de Mallorca, Spain Surface Tension, The Center for Photography, Woodstock, NY MOTA, See Line Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Photography Is, Higher Pictures, New York, NY The Crystal Chain, Invisible Exports, New York, NY
2011 Every Photograph Is In Visible, Churner and Churner, New York, NY Assembly: Eight Emerging Photographers, Fred Torres Collaborations, New York, NY Of Memory and Time, Hendershot Gallery, New York, NY
2010 Bedtime for Bonzo, M+B, Los Angeles, CA Genre Studies, Cardwell Jimmerson Gallery, Culver City, CA Edges of Light, Arts Benicia, Benicia, CA Assembly: Eight Emerging Photographers from Southern California Fotofest 2010 Biennial, Houston, TX matrix, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA Capitalism in Question (Because It Is), Pitzer Art Galleries, Pitzer College, Claremont, CA
2009 Shock and Awe, Gatov Galleries, California State University, Long Beach, CA Chef’s Theory, 533 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2008 2008 Torrance Juried Art Exhibition, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA Some Young LA Artists, Cardwell Jimmerson Gallery, Culver City, CA Laboratory, UCLA Thesis Exhibition, Wight Gallery (UCLA Broad Art Center) Los Angeles, CA
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
2007 Greater Los Angeles Masters of Fine Art Exhibition, CSU, Long Beach, CA The Most Curatorial Biennial of the Universe, Apexart, New York, NY
2005 Art Auction of the ‘Peter Coopers’, Cooper Union, New York, NY
2004 Thesis Exhibition, Cooper Union, New York, NY
2001 Ryman-Carroll Foundation Group Exhibition, Gallery 825, Los Angeles, CA Post-Ryman Group Exhibition, Schomburg Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2000 Emerging Young Artist Fund and Scholarship Exhibition, Colburn Performing Art Centers, Los Angeles, CA
1999 Pro and Protégés, Barnsdall Metropolitan Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
CURATED EXHIBITIONS
A about bauhaus...harm neu tues, Cardwell Jimmerson Gallery, Culver City CA, March 27-April 17,2010
COLLECTIONS
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY North Carolina Museum of Art The Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY The Columbus Museum of Art, OH Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Jimenez – Colon Collection, Ponce, PR Bidwell Projects, Ohio Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Sir Elton John Photography Collection Statoil Collection, Connecticut, MA UBS Art Collection, New York, NY The Wieland Collection, Atlanta, GA Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH Royal Danish Library, National of Photography, Copenhagen, Denmark Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
“20 Artists to Collect Now,” Architectural Digest, December Issue, 2013 Bramowitz, Julie. “Matthew Brandt and a Handful of Dust,” Interview Magazine, November, 15, 2013 “THR Art Issue: Top 10 L.A. Artists Coveted by Hollywood,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 4, 2013 “50 Under 50: The Next Most Collectible Artists,” Art+Auction, June 2013 Westerbeck, Colin. “Top Finds at Paris Photo Los Angeles,” Art in America, May 16, 2013 Gardiner, Ross. “Beauty in the Bread Down,” LA Canvas, 2013 Johnson, Ken. “AIPAD Photography Show,” The New York Times, April 5, 2013 Lowry, Vicky. “Matthew Brandt,” Elle Décor, November 2012 Deitch, Jeffery and Close, Chuck. “Top 30 Under 30 in Art & Design,” Forbes, January 16, 2012 Di Nardo, Arianne, “Mixed media: Matthew Brandt,” Lay Flat, October 8, 2012 Diehl, Travis. “Review: Matthew Brandt at M+B,” Modern Painters, December 2011/January 2012 Issue “Matthew Brandt: Lakes, Trees, and Honeybees,” Le Journal de la Photographie, July 21, 2012 “Matthew Brandt,” Time Out New York, July 5, 2012 Dykstra, Jean. “Matthew Brandt,” Photograph Magazine, July/August 2012 Gopnik, Blake. “Self-portraits with Buzz,” The Daily Beast, June 28, 2012 “Matthew Brandt,” Museé Magazine, June, 2012 “Goings on about Town: Art,” The New Yorker, June, 19, 2012 Shaheen, Susan. “Water Works: Matthew Brandt’s Experimental Landscapes,” The New Yorker, June 5, 2012 Laluyan, Oscar. “The Secret Life of Photographs by Brandt,” Arte Fuse, May 30 2012 Johnson, Elizabeth. “Lakes, Trees and Honeybees,” CNN Photos, May 23, 2012 Rothman, Lily. “Lakes, Trees and Honeybees: Matthew Brandt at Yossi Milo Gallery,” Time Light Box, May 22, 2012 “Matthew Brandt’s Lakes, Trees and Honeybees at Yossi Milo Gallery,” The Huffington Post, May 8, 2012 Schwendener, Martha. “Closing Generation Gaps,” The New York Times, March 29, 2012 “The 100 Best Fall Shows: Matthew Brandt at M+B,” Modern Painters, September 2011 Cheh, Carol. “Best Art I Saw all Week: Matthew Brandt’s Electric Photographs in ‘Two Ships Massing’ at M+B: Don’t Touch or You’ll Get shocked,” LA Weekly, September 28, 2011 “Goings on about Town: Art,” The New Yorker, August 2, 2011 Aletti, Vince. “Assembly: Eight Emerging Photographers from Southern California,” The New Yorker, April 11, 2011 “Contemporary U.S. Photography” Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam, 2010 “Capitalism in Question (Because It Is),” Pitzer College Press, 2010 Davies, Stacy, “Really Want the Red Pill,” Inland Empire Weekly, February 2010 “Hands Up,” Self-published, 2010 Choate, Andrew. “Review of Chocolate, bees, dust, sperm & sprinkles at Cardwell Jimmerson” Art ltd., July/August 2009 Cunningham, Mark. “Surface Tension: Matthew Brandt’s Lakes and reservoirs 2,” Octopus, volume 4, Fall 2008
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
MATTHEW BRANDT
Matthew Brandt (b. 1982, Los Angeles) received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2004 and MFA from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2008. Interested in physicality, process and landscape, Brandt's ability to stretch the readings of an image—multiplying them both physically and conceptually— speaks directly to his interest in how images loom and meanings shift within a shared visual history.
Brandt's precocious talent landed him in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Armand Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Bidwell Projects (Ohio), the Elton John Collection, the UBS Art Collection, the Statoil Collection, Columbus Museum of Art (Ohio), Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Virginia), Cincinnati Art Museum (Ohio), the Royal Danish Library, The Jimenez-Colon Collection (Puerto Rico) and the Wieland Collection. He was recently featured in Art+Auction’s “50 Under 50: The Next Most Collectible Artists” in June. His first solo exhibition at M+B in the fall of 2011 was met with critical attention, selected by Modern Painters as part of “The 100 Best Fall Shows” and reviewed in the December/January 2013 issue. Brandt was included in the “The Top 30 Under 30 in Art and Design” for Forbes by Jeffrey Deitch in 2012 and Art in America included Brandt in their “Top Finds at Paris Photo Los Angeles 2013”. The Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio opened a solo exhibition of Brandt’s work entitled Sticky/Dusty/Wet, which will travel to the Virginia MOCA in the fall of 2014, Lakes and Reservoirs also opened in 2014 at SCAD Musuem of Art, Savannah, GA. In December 2013, his second solo exhibition, Velvet and Bubble Wrap opened at M+B and was reviewed by Art in America. Recent institutional group exhibitions include Land Marks at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), What is a Photograph? at the International Center of Photography (New York), Reality Check at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Currents at the Contemporary Art Museum (North Carolina) and Staking Claim at the Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego). He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
MATTHEW BRANDT
Selected Portfolio
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of sticky/dusty/wet, solo show at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia September 12 – December 28, 2014
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Silver Lake, WA 11, 2010 C-print soaked in Silver Lake water signed, titled and dated verso 30 x 40 inches (76 x 102 cm) unique (MBr.03.2511.30)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of sticky/dusty/wet, solo show at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia September 12 – December 28, 2014
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Laffy Taffy 3, 2012 signed, dated, titled verso Laffy Taffy on paper (multi layered silkscreen print) 40-3/4 x 30-1/4 inches (104 x 77 cm) (MBr.04.5012.40)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Phantoms in the Dirt, group show at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago July 24 – October 5, 2014
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of The Fifth Season, group show at James Cohan Gallery, New York June 26 – August 8, 2014
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt 'Mystic Falls K1Y1M2C5', 2013 multi layered duraclear and duratrans prints processed with Mystic Falls water, in led lightbox frame signed, titled, and dated verso 65-¼ x 46-¼ inches (165.7 x 117.5 cm) (MBr.12.0025.65)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Excavations, solo show at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York March 20 – May 10, 2014
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt La Brea D2AB, 2014 sun cured tar gathered from the La Brea tar pits, Los Angeles CA. on aluminum 59 x 88 inches (150 x 223.5 cm) unique (MBr.17.0002.59)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Excavations, solo show at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York March 20 – May 10, 2014
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt 711376Fu3, ‘Manhattan: 16th Street (west) – 8th Avenue’. 1931, 2014 gum bichromate print with dust swept from Beth Israel truck dock signed, dated and titled verso 61-1/8 x 46 inches (155.3 x 116.8 cm) unique (MBr.05.2501.61)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation view Trouble with the Index, group show at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, California February 1 – June 21, 2014
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Blacktail Lake WY 3, 2013 c-print soaked in Blacktail Lake water signed, titled and dated verso 72 x 105 inches (183 x 267 cm) unique (MBr.03.6203.72)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Velvet and Bubble Wrap, solo show at M+B, Los Angeles December 14, 2013 – January 18, 2014
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Velvet and Bubble Wrap, solo show at M+B, Los Angeles December 14, 2013 – January 18, 2014
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Burnout RT01E, 2013 silk velvet with acid treatment signed, titled and dated verso 54-¼ x 42-½ inches (137.8 x 108 cm) unique (MBr.15.0020.41)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Night Sky NGC 3372, 2013 cocaine on photographer's velvet* signed, titled and dated verso 52 x 120-½ inches (132.1 x 306.1 cm) (MBr.11.0012.52)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt GAP 3A, 2013 cyan, mangenta, yellow and black hair dye on individual layers of bubble wrap (5 layers total), in LED lightbox signed, titled and dated verso 57 x 45 x 3 inches (144.8 x 114.3 x 7.6 cm) unique (MBr.16.0007.57)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation view of the permanent collections at the Brooklyn Museum, New York July 24, 2013 – January 26, 2014
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Rogue Wave 2013, group show at L.A. Louver, Los Angeles July 18 – August 23, 2013
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Rainbow Lake WY G1, 2013 12 chromogenic prints soaked in Rainbow Lake water signed, titled and dated verso 20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.2 cm) (each) 75 x 140 inches (190.5 x 355.6 cm) (overall) unique (MBr.03.6412.20)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Land Marks, group show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York April 30 – August 18, 2013
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Night Sky and Lakes and Reservoirs, solo presentation at Paris Photo Los Angeles, California April 26 – April 28, 2013
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Lakes, Trees and Honeybees, solo show at Yossi Milo, New York May 24 – July 20, 2012
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Lakes, Trees and Honeybees, solo show at Yossi Milo, New York May 24 – July 20, 2012
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Bees of Bees No.2, 2011 Honeybees on paper (Gum Bichromate print) signed, titled and dated verso 43 x 73 inches (109 x 185.5 cm) (MBr.01.0002.43)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Two Ships Passing at M+B Gallery, California September 16 – October 29, 2011
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Two Ships Passing at M+B, Los Angeles September 16 – October 29, 2011
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Installation View of Two Ships Passing at M+B, Los Angeles September 16 – October 29, 2011
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt CHCE01, 2011 etched copper and fiberglass 36 x 49-1/2 inches (91.4 x 125.7 cm) (MBr.06.1015.36)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt American Lake, WA C3, 2011 C-print soaked in American Lake water signed, titled and dated verso 46 x 64 inches (116.8 x 162.6 cm) (MBr.03.1011.46)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Two Ships Passing, U.S., 2011 salted paper print with Pacific Ocean water signed, titled and dated verso 30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm) (MBr.15.0020.41)
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
MATTHEW BRANDT
Press and Press Releases
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
July 2014 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO Phantoms in the Dirt 600 S Michigan Ave Chicago IL 60605 Phone 312.663.5554 [email protected] mocp.org July 24 – October 5, 2014
Richard Mosse, Sugar Ray, 2012, digital chromogenic print, 72 x 90 inches, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Jeremy Bolen Anya Gallaccio Richard Mosse Adam Schreiber Matthew Brandt Jay Heikes Eileen Mueller Daniel Shea Shannon Ebner Joachim Koester Arthur Ou Greg Stimac Assaf Evron Harold Mendez Alison Rossiter Shane Ward
Chicago – The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College Chicago is pleased to present Phantoms in the Dirt. This exhibition brings together artworks that direct attention to elemental kinds of matter—wood and iron, water and dirt, or rugged, sparsely inhabited landscapes—as well as to the mutability of photographic meaning and to the equivocal presence of various remnants and traces. In addition to photographic work, the exhibition features sculptures, a 16mm film, and a site-specific wall installation. The sixteen artists represented in this show present their subjects in deceptively simple ways, and yet their works are steeped in a mysterious quality that seems to radiate from the mute facts of matter. Certain works in the show allude to photography’s empirical capacities—photography as a scientific tool or a form of evidence—including microscopy, criminal forensics, and social documentary photography. Other artists represented combine photographic imagery with actual matter from a certain place or transform their subject matter by creating otherworldly effects, such as Mosse’s arresting pink landscapes, which are a surreal by-product of using an infrared film that registers what the human eye cannot.
The traces evident in the show’s artworks often hint at larger frames of reference. Reaching for what is not immediately visible, some deal with troubling current economic realities, tangled geopolitical histories, or specific realities such as Rust Belt towns in the American heartland falling into decline, or continuing armed struggle in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The artists in Phantoms in the Dirt bring the rough world of matter into the foreground, but their examinations are attuned to both the substantial and the ephemeral, revealing ways in which visual evidence can point to what is not easily perceived.
Guest curated by Karsten Lund (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago). This exhibition is made possible as a result of Lund being selected by the Contemporary Arts Council, an independent non-profit organization, as their sponsored curator for 2014.
Public Programs
Opening Reception Thursday, July 24, 2014 5-7pm Museum
Several of the exhibiting artists will be present to informally discuss their work on view.
Artist Discussion with Anya Gallaccio, Jay Heikes and Adam Schreiber Moderated by Karsten Lund Thursday, September 11, 2014 6pm Museum
Each of the artists will discuss his or her work and their investigations of the material world through photography or sculpture.
Curator’s Tour Karsten Lund Thursday, September 25, 2014 6pm Museum
Presented in conjunction with Filter Photo Festival
Photos of Lakes Turn Psychedelic After Soaking in Their Waters
By Doug Bierend September 10, 2014
Typically, by the time a photograph is in the dark room, the subject of that photograph is long gone. But in Matthew Brandt’s series Lakes and Reservoirs, the dark room is where photo and subject meet.
Brandt leaves prints of landscapes shot around the country to decay, sometimes for days, sometimes for months, in H2O taken from the bodies of water they portray. The result is a psychedelic degradation of the images in a process that join subject and photograph in an intimate union.
“It was a way to literally put the material index in the photographic index, to use the thing to represent the thing,” Brandt says. “I go get the photographs, get the water, I make the print and then it just sort of sits in water. It feels a little bit like being a farmer, like cultivating crops or something.” Indian Tom Lake, CA, 1
Each image is dunked as a c-print, which are comprised of three layers of colored dyes and a light sensitive emulsion. These layers decay in the water drawn from the lakes and reservoirs, and interact to create new patterns of color and form that flow from within the already lovely photos. The results sometimes look like they’ve been painted with watercolors or burned with a flame. Some take on the effect of a monotonic filter, still others seem to erupt in bursts of light or become obliterated altogether. In each case the result is a surprise.
“Sometimes I’m happy when the image is still there, but I’m also happy when it completely degrades,” he says. “Honestly it never turns out exactly how I anticipate it. Like, never. There are always some disappointments or some happy eureka moments—it’s a bipolar relationship.”
The ongoing series started during a series of road trips in 2008, when Brandt was earning a graduate degree in fine arts at UCLA. He’s made more than 100 images. After taking several shots from a given shoreline, he chooses five or so favorites to submerge in water drawn from the bodies they document. After placing each c-print in a tray, he puts follows the typical darkroom process, adjusting color and contrast as the water works its degenerative magic.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
The results vary widely, and although they’re largely unpredictable, Brandt has noticed certain patterns. Heat definitely accelerates the process, and variables like the seasons, timing of draining the water or the tilt of the tray, even the smell of the water seem to signal the outcome.
“The water starts to get a little rank usually, and I noticed that makes it a little bit stronger coloristically, it works quicker. Maybe just the bacteria start to eat quicker or something,” he says. “There is some control, like If I want it to break down to the yellow layer I can just leave it in a little bit longer. But I try not to give too much of heavy handedness to it, I try not to dictate too much, because I think part of the fun of the work is seeing what happens—there’s no way to control water.”
Lakes and Reservoirs will be compiled in a book to be published this fall by Damiani. It’s the latest in a line of projects by Brandt that blur the line between subject and image. His photos often explore outmoded photo processes, like using body fluids of portrait subjects to create salt prints, or primordial gunk from the La Brea tar pits to make heliographs of extinct creatures.
The process of engaging with the world itself, and the photographic subjects it provides, motivate much of Brandt’s work. In doing so, the things he’s photographing are as much a part of the development process as the tools and chemicals. It’s a method Brandt enjoys, allowing his photographic practice to take him into the world to interact with it.
“It’s just sort of a way to work with the subject and let the image process be delegated by the subject and vice versa,” he says. “What’s really fun and attractive about photography is that there’s just so much out there that you can be inspired by.”
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Questioning the expectations of photography
By Cate McQuaid | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT August 12, 2014
After photography was introduced in the mid 19th century, painters had to rethink their art, to push at the possibilities of their medium. Impressionism, with its fluttering brush strokes and attention to light and color, followed.
The artists featured in “Process Priority” at Steven Zevitas Gallery all work in photography, but they question the definitions and expectations of their medium in the same way the Impres- sionists did (and painters have ever since).
The funny thing about this show is how painterly it is. Artists have experimented with photog- raphy since it began, and in the early days of art photography, they sought to re-create the feel of painting with blurry focus. Here, the focus is more on process than image.
Mariah Robertson’s spectacularly fluid “68” pours and jitters down a long, irregular strip of photographic paper. A right angle juts down from the top, filled with burbling diagonal streaks in tropical, aquatic tones. When palette and texture change below, it’s like you’ve gone from snorkeling in the Mediterranean to soaking in a sooty evening downpour in London. Those watery browns and lavenders run into vapors and speckles of cyan. It’s a breathless rush of color and gesture.
More darkroom pyrotechnics come from Matthew Brandt, who dips his landscape photograph in lake water, apparently as it develops, and Tamar Halpern, whose “The Ghost Sonata” layers what might be a transparency with a hole burned through it over a granular, rust-striped plane. “68” by Mariah Robertson
Others work more traditionally, but their imagery pushes toward abstraction. Barbara Kasten makes models out of screens and Plexiglas, which she photographs. Her “Scene VIII” uses light, reflection, transparency, and shadow to lead the eye down spatial rabbit holes. Bryan Graf’s “Lattice (Ambient) 112” is a straightforward photogram; he puts a mass of crumpled mesh on photographic paper and exposes it to light. The resulting yellow explosion on the left is flowerlike, with petals unfolding in blues and greens in a dizzying moiré effect.
Zevitas has a history of mounting the most rigorous, truly contemporary summer group shows in Boston. This one fits the bill.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Media Release Contact: Danny Cappiello E: [email protected] P: 619-238-7559 x203
MOPA Presents After Ansel Adams May 17 – September 28, 2014
San Diego, Calif. – The Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA) wants to show you our National Parks. Anchored by Ansel Adams, arguably the most recognizable name in landscape photography, their upcoming exhibition, After Ansel Adams, features a number of his images plus photographs from nine other contemporary artists.
All the images in this exhibition were photographed in National Parks of the American West and the photographers bring a variety of styles and practices to landscape photography.
“While some of these artists are directly influenced by Ansel Adams, all of them are working in the landscapes Adams connected with on a deep emotional level,” stated Chantel Paul, Assistant Curator at MOPA. “The photographs in this exhibition are diverse in their ability to capture the essence of the natural beauty available in these spaces as well as convey ideas of emotion beyond a documentation of place.”
While the selection of images is centered around the familiar terrain of US National Parks, the work itself demonstrates the ability of the artist to create an image all their own. The similarities and differences in the featured photographs demonstrate that at the core of any great artistic work is a unique idea and vision.
“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.” - Ansel Adams
The featured photographers are: Ansel Adams Matthew Brandt Bin Danh Mark Klett & Byron Wolfe Michael Lundgren Chris McCaw Takeshi Shikama Millee Tibbs Donna J. Wan
After Ansel Adams will be on display from May 17 through September 28, 2014 at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park.
For additional information please visit www.mopa.org/After-Ansel-Adams
Press Opportunities: To request high-resolution images, additional information or to schedule an interview, please contact Danny Cappiello at 619.238.7559 X203 or via email ([email protected]).
MOPA Information: MOPA is a center for visual learning, passionately dedicated to sharing and exploring the universal language of photography, film and video. Learn more at MOPA.org.
###
Highlights From NADA New York 2014 May 10, 2014 By Artspace Editors
SARA CWYNAR at Cooper Cole
Sara Cwynar's solo booth with Toronto-based gallery Cooper Cole is a victory lap for the artist after her recent solo show at Chelsea's Foxy Production, which was reviewed very favorably in the New York Times by Roberta Smith. Cwynar is a graphic artist by day, and fine artist by night, and its shows; her works flex their power to expand and flatten space in layers of built-up and re-photographed collaged images.
MATTHEW BRANDT at M+B Los Angeles
Matthew Brandt has carved out a niche for himself in the sub-genre of what might be called "process photography." He uses unconventional materials in traditional photographic techniques to produce unique photographic prints with a conceptual twist; for example his "dust" series, which uses collected dust and adhesive in place of the usual photographic chemicals to print delicate, gossamer images; or his photographs of lakes and rivers that are developed in liquid collected from the bodies of water themselves. In a two-person booth with Jesse Stecklow, M+B is showing Brand't new series of fragile, subtle dust photos.
DAVE HARDY at Regina Rex
Hardy's sculptures are shown in Regina Rex's group booth alongside works by John Dilg, Kristen Jensen, Elisabeth Kley, Anna Mayer, Sarah Peters, Nicholas Pilato, and Hayal Pozanti. His minimalist found-object assemblages are made from cast-off materials like liner foam, sheets of glass, and squares of carpet. They're gravity-defying—sometimes frighteningly so (especially in the hustle and bustle of a fair)—and show an economy of means that highlights Hardy's acumen as a sculptor.
SUMMER WHEAT at Samsøn Projects
In her own words, Summer Wheat makes artworks—one of which is currently included in the show "Expanding the Field of Painting" at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Arts—that are "ugly but beautiful." Through juxtapositions of texture, color, and sensibility, they're also bold and gripping; particularly her paintings, which show the fecundity of unrestrained mark-making. Our favorties are her 'tapestries,' made by layering aluminum mesh with acrylic paint.
XAVIERA SIMMONS at David Castillo Gallery
Working in photography, performance, sound, sculpture, video, and installation, Xaviera Simmons (pronounced zy-VEER-ee-a) explores history, experience, and memory through abstraction. Working in "cycles" of photography, performance, and various other media, her work is in constant rotation. At NADA, Simmons is showing a series of works that tackle "cognitive capitalism" in quasi- portait photographs that point to the self's design through external aesthetic means, as well as text-based black-and-white paintings that signal a new direction in her ever-evolving ouevre.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
DAVID X. LEVINE at Steven Zevitas Gallery
David X. Levine works in colored pencil on paper, sometimes layered with collage, in super-large scale, creating pieces that area formally reminiscent of Sol LeWitt's well-known wall drawings. Levine has been working in New York for close to 20 years, but it's only recently that Brooklyn-based gallery Knowmoregames has been promoting his work. The fair will surely be an eye-opener for those not already familiar with his work.
LENA HENKE at Real Fine Arts
We're not sure what exactly to call Lena Henke's printed-on boxes of transparent plastic—in the traditional of Donald Judd's "specific objects," they hang on the wall but are clearly sculptural, and they use photographic images, but in abstracted forms. Based on her recent installation at MOCA North Miami last year, it's clear that Henke likes making works that are in proximity to, but don't quite fit, standard notions of objecthood. At a fair where 90 percent of the work is two-dimensional, these clearly stood out.
DOUGLAS MELINI at Eleven Rivington
Speaking of painting—if you're going to go the two-dimensional route, consider Douglas Melini's example. His tidy canvases are layered with tape, then piled on with thick oil paint; he also hand-paints his frames. The color palette is swamp-monster green, which gives Melini's works a pleasurably vegetal quality.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt, Excavations @Yossi Milo May 1, 2014 By Loring Knoblauch
JTF (just the facts): A total of 21 large scale photographic works, alternately framed in white and dark brown and unmatted, and hung in the two main gallery spaces and the smaller viewing room. 10 of the works on view are from the Dust series and are gum bichromate prints made from dust swept from the pictured locations. These works range in size from roughly 12×9 to 59×44 (or reverse), are unique, and were all made in 2014. 9 of the works are from the series La Brea and are heliographs made with tar from the La Brea Tar Pits. These works are single images and diptychs, with panels ranging in size from 54×45 to 72×43 (or reverse); these works are also unique, and were all made in 2013. The final 2 works are from the Clippings series are made from rhinestuds and caviar on linen. Both images are sized 72×42, are unique, and were made in 2014.
Comments/Context: Matthew Brandt’s ever-growing list of photographic projects exhibits a consistent sense of conceptual clarity that is satisfyingly straightforward. In nearly every series he has made over the past few years, a similar underlying formula can be used to describe what is taking place: Brandt makes (or appropriates) images of a place (or thing), and then includes physical manifestations of that place (or thing) in the chemical process used to generate the image, thereby infusing the image with tangible evidence of what it depicts, collapsing the photograph and its subject matter into one intermingled whole. With this innovative structural idea as a foundation, it’s now become a question of turning the crank and changing the variables to produce insightful and unexpected combinations, where the personality of the subject can come forth via its tangible presence.
The works in the back room of the gallery revive the antique heliograph process developed by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in the 1820s, using the black tar of the La Brea Tar Pits as a coating mix. Negatives of the skeletal displays of long extinct animals and birds in the research facility at the museum were placed on top of the coated aluminum plates and allowed to bake in the sun for several months, the area exposed to light hardening, leaving dark silhouettes when the plates were ultimately washed. The results are something akin to massive cave paintings or petroglyphs, with skeletons rearing up or poised for action against murky, seemingly charred brown backgrounds, like dioramas gone feral.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
The images from Brandt’s Dust series are more subtle. These works begin with found photographs of now demolished New York locales drawn from historical archives (often with stamps, measuring lines, or other markings), which then form the basis for contemporary excursions to those spots. Brandt visited each place and gathered up dust, incorporating it back into a unique gum bichromate process used to reprint each archival photograph. Here the physical remnants are less visible and more ephemeral - dust from the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library is imbedded in the gently dappled image of the old Croton Reservoir (which occupied that location in the late 1800s), the imperfections of the process creating a further layer of patina. The same approach is applied to a few images of the construction of the gallery, collapsing time and place more obviously, especially when the photograph depicts the very wall on which it hangs.
As Brandt continues to riff on this structured methodology, while it would be easy to place him in a long line of process-centric photographic tinkerers, his works are starting to bear some larger conceptual kinship to the work of Vik Muniz and his pictures made of various sculptural inputs (garbage, diamonds, chocolate syrup, shredded magazines etc.). While Brandt is investigating different facets of the alchemy of photographic processes and the nature of physicality, their common reliance on an underlying formula makes their works easily unpacked and understood.
In the end though, the conceptual cleverness of this process needs to be overshadowed by the specific artistic results, the how and why being trumped by the more immediate visceral experience of the art on display. When Brandt gets it just right, his best works resonate with a rich kind of synchronicity, the physical informing the visual in intricate, layered, time-collapsed harmony.
Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The works from the Dust series are generally $14000 each, aside from one smaller image of the gallery space itself at $2500. The works from the La Brea series are either $20000 (single panel) or $38000 (diptych). Brandt’s work has very little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail is likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
A New Chapter for M+B: Staying True to its Photo Roots While Embracing the Best of Contemporary Art April 29, 2014
Jesse Stecklow Untitled (Variants), 2014 M+B
It has become more and more apparent in recent years that photography is a crucial means for a broad range of contemporary artists who would never consider themselves photographers as such. This fact came to the fore recently at Los Angeles gallery M+B, which was once strictly dedicated to photography, and in recent years, through an irresistible roster of top artists—including Matthew Brandt, Alex Prager, and Jon Rafman—who have transcended the limits of medium. “Almost all of the artists that we've shown in the past few years are contemporary artists; they don't see themselves as photographers or particularly tied to that medium,” assistant director Alexandra Wetzel told us. The gallery recently announced that it would further its pursuits, staying true to its roots through M+B Photo, and upholding its newer contemporary approach at M+B. At NADA New York, they’ll show two hot L.A.-based artists who perfectly encapsulate the current M+B program: Jesse Stecklow and Matthew Brandt.
At the helm of the gallery is Benjamin Trigano, who founded M+B in 2008—out of his passion for photography—and has developed a reputation for signing on artists who have never been shown before. It was on a visit to a group show to see works by newcomer Dwyer Kilcollin that he discovered the works of Jesse Stecklow, a 20-year-old who is a current undergraduate student at UCLA, and co-founded design firm Content is Relative at the age of 18. Stecklow takes on half of M+B’s NADA presentation through his complex, multilayered Variant works. For these works Stecklow begins with a clay-and-water painting on canvas, which he photographs before it dries, and then alters the image using Photoshop. He incorporates detritus from his studio, photographs these elements, and merges images, ultimately printing, through dye sublimation, directly onto sheets of aluminum. Wetzel emphasizes that “there’s no indexical nature, everything’s constantly changing.”
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt Matthew Brandt 3984846u3, Tenement row; demolition site.’ 1936, 2014 713447Fu1, ‘Manhattan : 50th Street – Lexington Avenue’. 1910, 2014 M+B M+B
Nearby will be works by Matthew Brandt, which are vastly different, but share the fact that each piece is completely unique. Known for a practice where “the subject matter has a literal tie-in to the way the work is made,” Brandt is one of the artists who, some four years ago, helped M+B open up its program. Wetzel explains, “he became very well known for a body of work called ‘Lakes and Reservoirs,’ where he would go out and take beautiful, informed views of different bodies of water, collect water at the source, return to his studio where he would develop traditional chromogenic prints, and then soak the prints in the subject matter’s actual water.” At NADA, the gallery shows Brandt’s new “Dust” series, sodium gum bichromate prints featuring historic architectural images of New York. He pores over archives to find his subjects, buys the rights to them, and uses them to create negatives. “He then seeks out [each photograph’s] current location,” Wetzel explains, “sweeping dust off of whatever structure might be there now—an apartment building, a grocery store, a bank—and after returning to his studio, mixes the dust, as pigment, with the sodium gum bichromate solution.” After coating the paper in this solution, it is exposed as a contact print, which causes the dust to harden. “You are left with an image of a no longer existing building pigmented with its own dust,” Wetzel affirms. “It’s literally using something in that picture to help record it further. There is something classically romantic and very nostalgic about it.”
M+B, NADA New York 2014, Booth 600, May 9th–11th.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Review: Matthew Brandt at Yossi Milo April 5, 2014 By Paul Laster, Modern Painters
Since his first solo show five years ago, Matthew Brandt hasmade a major impact on the avant-garde photography scene. The son of a successful commercial photographer, Brandt rebelled by pursuing painting as an undergraduate at Cooper Union. He later merged the mediums of painting, silkscreen, and photographic processes both antiquated and digital, creating a DIY body of work while attending UCLA. Brandt returns to Yossi Milo Gallery for his second solo show, titled “Excavations,” on view through May 10, with three new series of works that explore archeological subject matter in adventurous ways.
Most impressive is a selection of 2013 heliographs of the skeletal remains of Ice Age animals photographed in displays at the George C. Page Museum of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. Using tar from the pits to make unique, large-scale prints on aluminum that have a Matthew Brandt's "La Brea D2AB," 2013, from the series La Brea. dirty patina, Brandt captures saber-toothed cats, American neophrons, (© Matthew Brandt, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York) and Brea condors using the same 19th-century process that Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used to make the first photographs. The blackness of the tar defines the prehistoric beasts in haunting detail.
Mining his East Coast roots, Brandt’s second most convincing series of the three presented utilizes archival photographs of New York City demolition and construction projects to make gum bichromate prints with dust collected from the current sites. Demolition of Madison Square Garden, 1925, (2014) depicts the wreckage of the Neoclassical building with grime from the municipal arena’s second incarnation while Yossi Milo Gallery, 2012, H6 (2014) shows a worker on a ladder constructing a hallway that connects the gallery’s spaces. The photo is displayed in the same hallway, which is a nod to the reflexive nature of the artist’s practice.
A version of this article appears in the Summer 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
“What Is a Photograph?” ICP - INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY 1133 Avenue of the Americas January 31–May 1
March 1, 2014 By Gabriel H. Sanchez
Many of the artists in this expansive exhibition place an emphasis on the physicality—or lack thereof—of photography rather than on its capacity to represent the outside world. As a whole, “What Is a Photograph?” might be taken as a diagnostic inquiry, with the title reading as a rhetorical question. Curated by Carol Squiers, the exhibition includes twenty-one artists, ranging from Gerhard Richter and James Welling to Liz Deschenes and Eileen Quinlan, and has tasked itself with surveying the medium since the 1970s.
The work of both Matthew Brandt and Letha Wilson exhume a long-standing tradition of American landscape photography with fresh invigoration. In Brandt’s large-scale Grays Lake, ID 7, 2013, Technicolor abstractions stem from an actual processing bath in the depicted lake waters, while Wilson’s monolith Grand Tetons Concrete Column, 2012, employs industrial concrete to sculpturally engage her iconic views of the American West. Draped through the gallery’s foyer is Mariah Robertson’s 154, 2010. This single photograph measures one hundred feet in length and has been meticulously hand-processed by the artist in a highly toxic photochemical environment. The remarkable result validates its production, as every inch of this dangling photograph reveals a labyrinth of glowing hues and pictorial intricacies.
Parallel to romanticizing the darkroom are the several artists who wholeheartedly embrace the more conventional, digitalized avenues associated with the medium. Travess Smalley’s Capture Physical Presence #15, 2011, exploits the imaging systems of a flatbed scanner to manipulate his collages into what he describes as mind-numbing “feedback loops.” Kate Steciw’s approach in Apply, 2012, takes advantage of a Google-based research method, purchased stock imagery, and sculptural tack-ons that recall the slick advertisements of commercial photography. Elsewhere in the gallery, a wall text accompanying Jon Rafman’s eerie and unadorned busts reads, “The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage / Not, at any rate, an attic grace.”
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
20 Jan 2014 ArtScene night sky works, which come with their own disclaimer: “Some artworks in this exhibition contain trace amounts of cocaine...” the inclusion of which “is strictly for conceptual artistic pur- poses,” and the removal of which is “in violation of the Artist’s copyrights including, but not limited to, the Visual Artists Rights Act.” Clearly the stakes have been raised from Fred Tomaselli’s marijuana-and-pill paintings. Elsewhere in the show, semi-historic and perhaps forgotten Hollywood buildings in pre-, mid-, or post-demolition are depicted in gum bichromate prints with dust from their respective sites; images of the gaps between the various letters in the Hollywood sign, as seen from behind, are printed in CMYK hair dyes on layers of bubble wrap; and a series of torsos of anonymous figures wearing striped shirts, titled “Burnout” followed by initials and numbers, are made with acid treatments on silk velvet. The only potential weakness in evidence in an otherwise great show is the significant “Jared,” from the Ancestors of Christ divide between the gestalt of Hollywood Windows, Canterbury Cathedral, England, 1178-80, colored glass and vitreous paint; lost souls and the seductive photographic lead came, is currently on view at the J. Paul objects that, in their way, are so refined Getty Museum. Image © Robert Greshoff in their clever productions that any emo- Photography, Courtesy Dean and Chapter tional residue is rendered mute. And yet, of Canterbury. that may very well be the point (M+B Fine Art, West Hollywood). windows. Because the Psalter (thought MS to have been owned by Christina of Makyate, a pious noble-born nun) is Ambach & Rice now occupies a temporarily unbound for restoration, space that formerly housed the Daniel a generous selection of its dramatic pages is rotated into this exhibition of rarely seen medieval art (J. Paul Getty Museum of Art, West Los Angeles). DC
Matthew Brandt’s currently white-hot career is not without legiti- macy: his disparate and exploratory use of photographic development process- es and alternative media are conceptu- ally poetic and digestibly irreverent. Building upon his already signature m.o. of reintegrating samples from a given landscape (specifically bodies of water) into the photos themselves, Brandt has expanded that vocabulary while enigmatically riffing on thematic clichés swirling around his studio’s backyard of Hollywood. His incorpo- Matthew Brandt, “Night Sky NGC 3601,” 2013, ration of unusual materials reaches its cocaine on photographer’s velvet, 73 x 46”, apotheosis in two cocaine-on-velvet is currently on view at M+B.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
ARTIST MATTHEW BRANDT REVIVES THE HISTORY OF EARLY March 27, 2014 By Rebecca Bates
While the casual Instagram photographer is content to take a snapshot, share it with the public, and move on to the next conquest, Matthew Brandt takes a more deliberate approach. The artist toils over the development of his images, turning the production of his work into a painstaking manual labor by using long-forgotten techniques borrowed from the world’s earliest photographers. Brandt’s second solo show at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York City, aptly titled “Excavations,” is dominated by large-scale images of the past, from 20th- century ruins to found photos from yesterday’s news to the shadowy outlines of ancient fossils.
Many of Brandt’s images seem to reach back across lost time. For his “Dust” series, the artist scoured the archives of the New York Public Library for historic photos of demolition sites around the city (e.g., the Madison Square Garden arena that was pulled down in 1925, or the remnants of destroyed tenement buildings). Brandt reproduced these images as large prints and used the dust and dirt he gathered from where these structures once stood as pigment in a process known as gum bichromate emulsion. Each image features a piece of historic design lost to the modern cityscape, and even Brandt’s technique is rooted in the early history of the medium. “[This method] was most prominent when photography was struggling to establish itself as an art form,” Brandt explains. “It’s a very painterly process: It is brushed on and can be brushed off.” Brandt’s “La Brea” series engages with even more distant Demolition of Madison Square Garden, 1925 history, with the artist first photographing fossil displays at the Matthew Brandt, 2014
La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and then developing the negatives on an emulsion of tar collected on-site. Known as heliographs, Brandt says he was drawn to these images for their historical implications, explaining that the technique “is a very crude and primitive process and is the earliest stable photographic form.” The resulting series consists of large images, almost amber in hue, of giant birds and mammals that look like cave paintings or even fossils themselves.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
La Brea B2, 2013 Crop 2, 2014
Other works on view incorporate enlarged sections of a photograph Brandt clipped from the Los Angeles Times, each snippet a reminder of just how transient and easily overlooked daily print news is. Ultimately, the crux of Brandt’s work lies in the tug-of-war between forgotten history and changing technology and design, as the artist repurposes artistic practices that have long since gone the way of the saber-toothed tiger.
Through May 10 at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York; yossimilo.com
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
MATTHEW BRANDT
LOS ANGELES, at M+B March 27, 2014 by Jennifer S. Li Matthew Brandt’s hands-on experiments in the darkroom transcend sheer novelty and contend with the nature of photography as described by Roland Barthes. According to Barthes, the photograph becomes indistinguishable from (and confused with) its pictorial referent. Brandt often combines photo- graphs and physical elements of their depicted subjects to produce his works. While pursuing his MFA at UCLA in 2006-08 (under the tutelage of James Welling), for instance, he shot portraits of friends and mixed their shed tears into the printing solutions he used to develop the images; and in 2012 he pro- cessed his “Lakes and Reservoirs” series with liquid collected from the bodies of water portrayed. For his recent exhibition at M+B, Brandt, whose studio is in Hollywood, took his artistic process into new territory, offering a selection of compelling works (all 2013) that focus on the image of Los Angeles.
In the “Burnout” series, photographs showing the stylishly clothed torsos of Brandt’s friends and studio assistants are printed on lush, white silk velvet us- ing a burnout process—a technique popular in fashion design in which acid is applied to fabric to “burn out” fibers and produce areas of semitransparency. Thus, in printing photographs of clothing using a technique commonly found on garments, Brandt has unified subject and medium (if less literally so than in his earlier works). The monochromatic sepia washes, bleached-out fields of white and areas of burnt brown, however, belie the au courant medium and contemporary imagery, evoking albumen prints by Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. The title of the series not only refers to the process used, but also slyly connotes celebrities whose stars have faded and who have become racked with addiction. Matthew Brandt: GAP 2A, 2013 hair dye on five layers of bubble wrap in LED lightbox “GAP,” a series of eight LED lightboxes, offers an unusual perspective on 57 x 45 inches; at M+B. the famed Hollywood sign, showing only fragments of the letters and
focusing instead on the overgrown spaces between them. Each lightbox contains five layers of bubble wrap: four are printed mono- chromatically, with cyan, magenta, yellow and black hair dye, while the fifth is printed with the full-color image (the sheet’s inflated cells creating the effect of benday dots). Composed with bubble wrap, the artwork is made of air and plastic-materials often associated with Los Angeles. The lightboxes may shine brightly, but they can easily be unplugged or, to take the title of the aforementioned series, burn out.
The show concluded with Night Sky NGC 3372, a large composition that appears to be celestial nebulae and radiating stars swirling together against a dark, infinite sky. In smog-covered L.A., actual cosmic phenomena are often not visible, but the population itself is certainly star-studded. The scenic starscapes are in fact rendered in cocaine—the drug of choice in Tinseltown—silkscreened on black velvet. For Brandt, artistic materials are not just supporting actors—they take on a leading role.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
For Immediate Release: Matthew Brandt Excavations March 20 – May 10, 2014 Artist’s Reception: Thursday, March 20, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographic works by Matthew Brandt from three series, Dust, La Brea and Clippings, collectively titled Excavations. The exhibition will open Thursday, March 20 and close on Saturday, May 10, with an opening reception for the artist on Thursday, March 20 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.
In a digital world, Brandt upholds fading photographic materials and processes. His work explores vastly different photographic technologies and finds common ground between the medium and the subject. For the artist’s new bodies of work, subject and material converge in unexpected ways to create one-of-a-kind photographs that incorporate remnants from history to form a composite picture of today. From the skeletal remains of California’s prehistoric animals, to the dust particles of New York City, or the magnified details of a newspaper clipping, all are sites of excavation.
Brandt’s Dust prints compress time by reproducing historical photographs of demolished sites and buildings with physical elements from the present. The artist uses images of demolitions and historic New York City neighborhoods found in the New York Public Library archives to produce large-scale negatives. He then visits the location of the original building and collects dust from the structure now situated on the lot, which is used as pigment in a handmade gum-bichromate emulsion. New works from the series depict locations in the Chelsea neighborhood in the 1930s, the Lower East Side at the turn of the century, and the destruction of iconic New York City landmarks, such as Madison Square Garden and Grand Central Terminal. Dust photographs were also made of the Gallery, using dust collected during construction in 2012.
For the La Brea series, Brandt revives the heliography process, the same technique invented by Nicéphore Niépce to make the oldest surviving photograph, to create images of fossilized skeletal remains. Brandt photographs pre-historic animal displays, such as the Saber-Toothed Cat, American Neophron and Brea Condor, at the George C. Page Museum, the research institute at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. While there, he collected tar from the pits to make large- scale heliographs of the images. Brandt covers an aluminum plate with the tar, places the negative on top and leaves the plate outside to bake in the sun. Over time, the tar exposed to light solidifies. After, the plate is washed, leaving an image of the fossil created from its ancient remains.
The series Clippings addresses the fading prominence of printed news. Brandt employs the lithography printing process, typically used for newspapers, to reproduce blown-up details of a found photograph from the Los Angeles Times depicting tourists at the United States Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. The magnified newsprint image breaks down into colored dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black, which the artist recreates on canvas using rhinestuds of varying sizes to define the CMY color dots and caviar for the black. Clippings celebrate the materiality of newspaper photographs, fleeting images that are disposed of daily and quickly forgotten.
Matthew Brandt's first solo museum exhibition, Matthew Brandt sticky/dusty/wet, is currently on view at the Columbus Museum of Art and will travel to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. Photographs from Brandt's Lakes and Reservoirs series are in a solo show at the SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) Museum of Art and in the International Center of Photography's group exhibition, What is a Photograph?. The artist's work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Cincinnati Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Royal Danish Library, National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. Brandt was born in California in 1982, received his BFA from The Cooper Union in New York and his MFA from UCLA. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
3834 Main Street California Museum of Photography Riverside, CA 92501 Sweeney Art Gallery 951.827.3755 Culver Center of the Arts culvercenter.ucr.edu University of California, Riverside sweeney.ucr.edu cmp.ucr.edu artsblock.ucr.edu
PRESS RELEASE For Immediate Release
UCR ARTSblock presents the exhibition
Trouble with the Index
Walead Beshty, Matthew Brandt, John Divola, Victoria Fu, Farrah Karapetian, Heather Rasmussen, James Welling, Jennifer West, and Mario Ybarra, Jr.
February 1–June 21, 2014
RIVERSIDE, Calif., Dec. 20, 2013 – The California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock presents Trouble with the Index, on view in the main gallery of the museum from February 1 through June 21, 2014, featuring works by Walead Beshty, Matthew Brandt, John Divola, Victoria Fu, Farrah Karapetian, Heather Rasmussen, James Welling, Jennifer West, and Mario Ybarra, Jr. A reception celebrating this and other exhibitions will be held at the museum on Saturday, February 1, 6-9pm, and is free and open to the public.
The truth of photographs has always been conflicted. Light hits sensitized paper to produce a picture of the world, capturing a moment in time. This was here, every photograph asserts. But the picture is flat and static, bound by edges and defined by depth of field, reproducible and variable in size: an artificial organization of a world that is spatial and temporal. Nevertheless, this was here. Since photography was invented, it has carried with it this basic condition of “indexicality.” A photograph must exhibit some element of proof, some trace of reality, to be a photograph.
Trouble with the Index presents a selection of photographs by Southern California- based artists whose work grapples with this complicated state of photographic truth. Some of the works included here illustrate an index found in the world, as in John Divola’s photograph of light passing through a broken window, and Heather Rasmussen’s depiction of a bathroom wall, charred in a fire. There is an attention to size in the works gathered here, as in Mario Ybarra, Jr.’s photomural, which depicts the interior walls of a bunker in near one-to-one scale, and James Welling’s use of a common household material — foil — that nevertheless might conjure a vast geographical topography. Some of the works have been generated through direct imprints: Walead Beshty uses FedEx to ship a pristine cube to the museum, where it is displayed bearing all the marks of that transit, and Farrah Karapetian makes photograms of ice, even while the material melts and slips during the print’s production.
Victoria Fu’s prints are the culminations of numerous in-studio processes that include projection, photography, printing, construction, digital manipulation, re- projection, re-photography, and re-printing. Matthew Brandt’s work combines two distinct registers of indexicality: after making a straight photograph of a lake, he then soaks it in that lake’s water. Jennifer West also embraces some elements of chance, frequently intervening in the image-making process with unconventional materials. After filming Spiral Jetty — an earthwork constructed by the artist
Robert Smithson on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah in 1970 — West exposed the film multiple times, treating it to materials such as saline, brine shrimp, citrus juices, and vinegars.
Photographs alone can no longer secure their truth claim simply by accurately depicting the world in two dimensions. Through additional maneuvers artists privilege the index over pictorialism, pushing their resulting pictures even to complete abstraction. Far from acting as invisible players, the artists themselves — through their actions — are registered in each work; This was here is now I was here.
Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London) is an artist and writer working in Los Angeles, and Associate Professor in the Graduate Art Department of Art Center College of Design. Beshty’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including the solo exhibitions Securities and Exchanges at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2011); A Diagram of Forces at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden and Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid (2011); Legibility on Color Backgrounds at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2009); and EMBASSY!: a dismal science waiting room at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2006). Beshty’s work is included in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among elsewhere. Monographs on his work include Walead Beshty: Natural Histories (JRP|Ringier, 2011) and Walead Beshty: Selected Correspondences 2001-2010 (Damiani Editore, 2010). Forthcoming publications include a second expanded edition of Walead Beshty: Natural Histories; an anthology edited by Beshty and Jason E. Smith, Post-Fordist Aesthetics; and an anthology of Beshty’s collected writings (all due out on JRP|Ringier, 2014). Beshty earned his BA at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson in 1999, and his MFA at the Yale University School of Art, New Haven in 2002.
Matthew Brandt (b. 1982, Los Angeles) is a Los Angeles-based artist interested in physicality, process, and landscape. His ability to stretch the readings of images — multiplying them both physically and conceptually — speaks directly to his interest in how images loom and meanings shift within a shared visual history. His work is currently on view in a solo exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2013-14), and will travel to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach (2014). Brandt’s work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Bidwell Projects, Ohio; the Elton John Collection; the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; the Royal Danish Library, and the Wieland Collection, among others. He received his BFA at Cooper Union in 2004, and his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008. http://www.matthewbrandt.com
John Divola (b. 1949, Los Angeles) is an artist who works primarily with photography and digital imaging. While he has approached a broad range of subjects over the course of his career, he is currently moving through the landscape looking for the oscillating edge between the abstract and the specific. His work has been featured in more than seventy solo exhibitions in Japan, Europe, Mexico, Australia, and the United States, including John Divola: As Far As I Could Get, an expansive three-venue exhibition organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pomona College Museum of Art (2013-14). Divola has been honored with numerous awards including the Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976, 1979, 1990); the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1986); the Fintridge Foundation Fellowship (1998); the City of Los Angeles Artist Grant (1999); and the California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship (1998). Since 1975 he has taught photography and art at numerous institutions including the California Institute of the Arts (1978-
page 2 of 7
1988). Since 1988 he has been a Professor of Art at the University of California, Riverside. He earned his BA at California State University, Northridge in 1971, and his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1974. http://www.divola.com
Victoria Fu (b. 1978, Santa Monica, CA) is a visual artist who lives and works in San Diego and Los Angeles. She films, photographs, and draws the image. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the University Art Gallery, UC Irvine (2014); Document Space, Chicago (2014); Savannah College of Art + Design (2009), and elsewhere. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2013); Carter & Citizen, Culver City (2013); LAXART, Los Angeles (2012); Chinati Foundation, Marfa (2012); Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2011); and De Appel, Amsterdam (2009), among elsewhere, and her work will be included in the upcoming 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York. Fu is a 2014-15 Irvine Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center and current grantee of Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s YoYoYo Artist Project Fund and Art Matters Foundation. Fu co- directs ART OFFICE’s The Moving Index. She attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and Skowhegan in 2006. She earned an MFA at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, an MA in Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Southern California, and a BA in Art at Stanford University. http://www.victoriafu.com
Farrah Karapetian (b. 1978, Marin, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist who works with camera-less photography in a sculptural and increasingly relational field. Her work has been featured in Good Sign, a public installation in abandoned signage for the Flint Public Art Project, Michigan; the 2013 California-Pacific Triennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; and Rogue Wave '13 (15 Artists From Los Angeles), L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, among other exhibitions. Her work will be included in several upcoming exhibitions, including at the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Puebla, Mexico; the Armory Center for the Arts; and the Torrance Art Museum. Karapetian was associate curator of The Black Mirror (curated by James Welling and Diane Rosenstein), Diane Rosenstein Fine Art (2013), and is the curator of Unsparing Quality, Diane Rosenstein Fine Art (2014). She was a MacDowell Fellow (2010) and an artist-in-residence at the Wende Museum, Culver City (2009). In 2012 she was awarded a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her blog Housing Projects. She earned her BA at Yale University in 2000, and her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008. http://www.farrahkarapetian.com
Heather Rasmussen (b. 1982, Santa Ana, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro (2012); and the Sandroni Rey Container, Los Angeles (2009). She has exhibited nationally in group exhibitions, including at The Art Institute of Chicago; Mixed Greens, New York; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Hollywood; and Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles. Rasmussen’s work has been published in the book Unfolded, Paper in Design, Art, Architecture and Industry, alongside artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Thomas Demand, and Frank Gehry. She also has two self-published catalogs, ship happens 1 (2009) and ship happens 2 (2013). Rasmussen earned her BA in Art at the University of California, Irvine in 2004, and her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia in 2007. www.heatherrasmussen.com
James Welling (b. 1951, Hartford, CT) is a Los Angeles-based artist who has been questioning the norms of representation since the 1970s. His work centers on an exploration of photography, shuffling the elemental components of the medium to produce a distinctly uncompromising body of work. Welling’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Cincinnati Art Museum (2013); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013-14); University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMASS Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts (2013); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2012); Minneapolis Institute of
page 3 of 7
Arts, Minnesota (2010); Horticultural Society of New York (2007); Palais des Beaux- Arts, Brussels (2002); Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2002); Sprengel Museum Hannover (1999); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1998); and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (1998). In 2000, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio organized a major survey of his work, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 2009, Welling’s work was featured in the critically acclaimed historical survey, The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and in 2008, he participated in the Whitney Biennial. In 1992, his work was included in documenta IX. Welling’s work is held in major museum collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Welling earned his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia in 1974. After teaching briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Bard College, he moved to Los Angeles in 1995 to head the photography area in the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he continues to teach. http://jameswelling.net
Jennifer West (b. Topanga, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist who makes films, performances, photographs, drawings, sculptural works, and zines. She employs various unique processes, subjecting film negative and leader to an eclectic range of idiosyncratic substances including nail polish, liquid eyeliner, deodorant, wine, spices, gelatin, alcohol, body glitter, paintballs, and hot springs water, as well as such physical interventions as skateboarding, smearing, crushing, drawing, and throwing. West is influenced by classical structuralist film, urban mythology, folklore, and popular culture, and combines everyday actions and materials to create hypnotic, fast-paced films. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at S1 Artspace, Sheffield, England (2012); Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2010); Kunstverein Nuremberg, Germany (2010); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2008); and White Columns, New York (2007), among elsewhere. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (2013); Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds, UK (2012); MOCA, Cleveland (2012); Saatchi Gallery, London (2012); White Flag Projects, St. Louis (2011); White Columns, New York (2011); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2010); Seattle Art Museum (2010); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2009); Drawing Center, New York (2008); Aspen Art Museum (2008); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2008); CAPC Musee d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2007); Contemporary Art Museum, Detroit (2007); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2007); ZKM Museum for New Media, Karlsruhe (2007); and Tate St. Ives (2007). Special projects include commissions for High Line Art, New York (2012); The Aspen Art Museum (2010); and the Turbine Hall at TATE Modern (2009). West was Artist in Residence at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2011. She earned her MFA at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena in 2004, and her BA in Film and Gender Studies at Evergreen State College, Olympia. She is an Assistant Professor at the Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. http://www.jweststudio.com
Mario Ybarra, Jr. (b. 1972, Los Angeles) is a Los Angeles-based artist who incorporates sculpture, painting, installation, and performance into his work. Citing his childhood spent in the port community of Wilmington in Los Angeles as a continual source of inspiration, Ybarra’s work resonates both locally and globally. Though much of Ybarra’s work has been described as “Chicano art,” he is purposefully resistant to such biographical categorizations, attempting to challenge any easy conflation of identity and aesthetics. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions such as Double Feature, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); Mario Ybarra, Jr.: The Tío Collection, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (2012); Wilmington Good, Cardi Black Box, Milan (2011); Silver and
page 4 of 7
Blacks, Michael Janssen Gallery, Berlin (2010); Take Me Out… No Man Is An Island, Art Institute of Chicago (2008); and Black Squirrel Society, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York (2008). Ybarra has been included in numerous group exhibitions including The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, organized by the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (2013-14); Around The Table: Food, Creativity, and Community, San Jose Museum of Art (2013); Made in L.A., the Los Angeles Biennial organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART (2012); Invisible Cities, Instituto Cervantes, Madrid (2010); Whitney Biennial, New York (2008); Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008); Prague Biennale 3, Czech Republic (2007); The World as a Stage, Tate Modern, London, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2007); California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2006); and Alien Nation, Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2006). In 2008, Ybarra was awarded a Levitt Fellowship at Williams College, Massachusetts, and in 2011 he was the artist-in-residence at the Århus Kunstbygning Centre for Contemporary Art in Denmark. Ybarra earned his BFA from the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Anagles in 1999, and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2001. http://www.marioybarrajr.com
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Trouble with the Index is organized by the California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock and is curated by Curator of Exhibitions Joanna Szupinska-Myers.
Visit artsblock.ucr.edu for further details about the exhibition and related public programs.
VISITOR INFORMATION AND PRESS INQUIRIES
UCR ARTSblock is located at 3824 & 3834 Main Steet, Riverside, CA 92501, and includes three venues: the California Museum of Photography, Culver Center of the Arts, and Sweeney Art Gallery. ARTSBlock is open Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5pm. Admission is $3, which includes entry to all three venues. Galleries are open late 6–9pm and admission is free during First Thursday ArtWalks, which take place on the first Thursday of every month. Film screenings are held on Fridays and Saturdays in the Culver Theater. The Culver Center opens 30 minutes prior to film screenings.
Press contact: [email protected] Public contact: artsblock.ucr.edu
page 5 of 7
Interview: Matthew Brandt The experimental photographer makes images combining acid burnouts, velvet and cocaine
By Jonah Samson 23 January 2014
While his images—made from bubblegum, honeybees and toothpaste—quickly grabbed the attention of collectors and cura- tors worldwide, LA-based artist Matthew Brandt continued to explore the potential of other curious media in order to challenge the boundaries of what can be understood and accepted as photographic. With a recent show called “Velvet and Bubble Wrap” at LA’s M+B gallery, his first solo museum show—”Sticky/Dusty/Wet”—at the Columbus Museum of Art, and an upcoming show at NYC’s Yossi Milo Gallery, there is plenty of opportunity to see what this enthusiastic young artist will tackle next. We caught up with Brandt in his Hollywood studio to talk about his process, and to do some collaborative manipulations on a stash of vintage Polaroid film.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Your studio has a wonderful history. Can you tell me about it?
My studio is in a large concrete complex in Hollywood. It was built to manufacture Technicolor film. There are a lot of strange and peculiar architectural details that were once useful for specific manufacturing purposes, but are now just strange architectural anomalies. My studio is very spacious, but only has a few small squares in the ceiling to let light in. This is bad because I mostly work under fluorescent lighting, but is great for a simple means to block out light and turn the entire space into a dark room.
When I first saw your photographs of lakes—which had been deconstructed by soaking them inthelake water—I thought, "This guy is really changing the game!" By integrating the subject of the photograph into the photograph itself, you found a way to bring some of the magic back into the medium that is being lost through digitization. Do you think that part of your success comes from the fact that your reconnect people with the magic of the photographic process?
It seemed like a very logical step/process to integrate the photographic subject into making his or her own images. I felt a particular responsibility for representing the subject faithfully. There is always a burden with representation, collaborating with the material of the subjects themselves in making their pictures was one way to alleviate some of this guilt.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
You’ve made pictures out of bees and dust and bubblegum and cocaine—you embrace the history and the alchemy of making a photograph in a way that is often brushed aside by many other young artists working in the medium. What’s the appeal in playing the “mad scientist”?
Since photography’s birth, photographers have been tinkering and utilizing any means possible to make a picture. There were no streamlined industrialized go-to ingredients necessarily, and photographers were also chemists, tinkerers and mad scien- tists—just figuring out what does what. There are still many technical mysteries within historical photographic processes that are unknown as to how and why it happens.
For example, the rare occasion that daguerreotypes depict color. I like exploring this idea in thinking about how images are made physically. And this relationship within this terrain of the photographic index (that of the visual and the material index) interests me very much.
What new processes are you trying to figure out? What will we be seeing from you in your upcoming show?
This spring at Yossi Milo gallery, I will be dipping far into photo history by showing heliographs. A heliograph is the very first fixed photograph, made by Niepce in the late 1700s.
Matthew Brandt's show at NYC's Yossi Milo Gallery opens March 13, 2014.
Photos by Jonah Samson and Matthew Brandt
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
20 Jan 2014 ArtScene night sky works, which come with their own disclaimer: “Some artworks in this exhibition contain trace amounts of cocaine...” the inclusion of which “is strictly for conceptual artistic pur- poses,” and the removal of which is “in violation of the Artist’s copyrights including, but not limited to, the Visual Artists Rights Act.” Clearly the stakes have been raised from Fred Tomaselli’s marijuana-and-pill paintings. Elsewhere in the show, semi-historic and perhaps forgotten Hollywood buildings in pre-, mid-, or post-demolition are depicted in gum bichromate prints with dust from their respective sites; images of the gaps between the various letters in the Hollywood sign, as seen from behind, are printed in CMYK hair dyes on layers of bubble wrap; and a series of torsos of anonymous figures wearing striped shirts, titled “Burnout” followed by initials and numbers, are made with acid treatments on silk velvet. The only potential weakness in evidence in an otherwise great show is the significant “Jared,” from the Ancestors of Christ divide between the gestalt of Hollywood Windows, Canterbury Cathedral, England, 1178-80, colored glass and vitreous paint; lost souls and the seductive photographic lead came, is currently on view at the J. Paul objects that, in their way, are so refined Getty Museum. Image © Robert Greshoff in their clever productions that any emo- Photography, Courtesy Dean and Chapter tional residue is rendered mute. And yet, of Canterbury. that may very well be the point (M+B Fine Art, West Hollywood). windows. Because the Psalter (thought MS to have been owned by Christina of Makyate, a pious noble-born nun) is Ambach & Rice now occupies a temporarily unbound for restoration, space that formerly housed the Daniel a generous selection of its dramatic pages is rotated into this exhibition of rarely seen medieval art (J. Paul Getty Museum of Art, West Los Angeles). DC
Matthew Brandt’s currently white-hot career is not without legiti- macy: his disparate and exploratory use of photographic development process- es and alternative media are conceptu- ally poetic and digestibly irreverent. Building upon his already signature m.o. of reintegrating samples from a given landscape (specifically bodies of water) into the photos themselves, Brandt has expanded that vocabulary while enigmatically riffing on thematic clichés swirling around his studio’s backyard of Hollywood. His incorpo- Matthew Brandt, “Night Sky NGC 3601,” 2013, ration of unusual materials reaches its cocaine on photographer’s velvet, 73 x 46”, apotheosis in two cocaine-on-velvet is currently on view at M+B.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MATTHEW BRANDT Velvet and Bubble Wrap December 14, 2013 – January 18, 2014
Opening Reception Saturday, December 14, 2013 from 6 to 8 pm
M+B is pleased to announce Matthew Brandt: Velvet and Bubble Wrap, the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery featuring new work that explores Hollywood as both a construct and a landscape. The exhibition runs from December 14, 2013 through January 18, 2014, with an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, December 14 from 6 to 8 pm.
Presented in this show are some new works made in my studio in Hollywood, California. Here is a list, in no particular order, of some of the materials involved:
velvet acid bubble wrap dust cocaine H aluminum light nebulae cyan hair dye magenta hair dye yellow hair dye black hair dye Hollywood gaps stripes torsos friends
- Matthew Brandt, Hollywood, November 2013
Cocaine, the Hollywood Sign, plush velvet, cheap fantasies, interchangeable personalities, identities of affect, trends, bubbles, stars, and slick surfaces—Brandt directly employs Hollywood tropes and transforms them, prodding and mixing the stereotypical, material signifiers of identity in the Los Angeles landscape.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Matthew Brandt’s images physically incorporate the work’s subject matter into his creative process, tethering conceptual creativity to material production and furthering the read. Starry night skies typically obliterated by city lights are elegantly composed in swirls of cocaine on black velvet. Torsos donning patterned and striped shirts are burned and etched onto fields of pristine white silk velvet. Gaps between the letters of the Hollywood sign are printed in hair dye on bubble wrap, glowing in abstracted scenes.
Matthew Brandt (b. 1982, Los Angeles) received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2004 and his MFA from UCLA in 2008. He was recently featured in Art+Auction’s “50 Under 50: The Next Most Collectible Artists” in the June 2013 issue, and his first solo exhibition at M+B in the fall of 2011 was met with critical attention: selected by Modern Painters as part of “The 100 Best Fall Shows” and reviewed in the December/January 2013 issue. Brandt was included in the “The Top 30 Under 30 in Art and Design” for Forbes by Jeffrey Deitch in 2012 and Art in America included him in their “Top Finds at Paris Photo Los Angeles” earlier this year. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Armand Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Bidwell Projects (Ohio), The Sir Elton John Photography Collection, UBS Art Collection, Statoil Collection, Columbus Museum of Art (Ohio), Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York), North Carolina Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Cincinnati Art Museum (Ohio), Royal Danish Library and Wieland Collection, among others. This fall, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio will open Brandt’s first institutional solo exhibition entitled Sticky/Dusty/Wet, which will travel to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in the fall of 2014. Recent institutional group exhibitions include Land Marks at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Reality Check at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Currents at the Contemporary Art Museum (North Carolina) and Staking Claim at the Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego). Matthew Brandt lives and works in Los Angeles.
Location: M+B, 612 North Almont Drive, Los Angeles, California 90069 Show Title: Matthew Brandt: Velvet and Bubble Wrap Exhibition Dates: December 14, 2013 – January 18, 2014 Artist’s Opening Reception: Saturday, December 14, 6 – 8pm Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm, and by appointment
For more information, please contact Alexandra Wetzel at M+B at (310) 550-0050 or [email protected].
Matthew Brandt "Night Sky" Disclaimer: Some artworks in this exhibition contain trace amounts of cocaine incorporated into the materials used and thus rendered unusable in any other context. The inclusion of the cocaine is strictly for conceptual artistic purposes and is not intended in theory or practice to be considered by the viewer or purchaser in any other way. The Artist would deem the removal of any materials from any of these pieces an unauthorized alteration or destruction of the work in violation of the Artist's copyrights including, but not limited, to the Visual Artists Rights Act.
# # #
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Columbus Museum of Art: Exposed to new concepts Bold manipulation of photographs adds tactile quality
December 3, 2013 By Elizabeth Trapp
Mary’s Lake, MT 7 Every now and then, an artist comes along who challenges tradition.
Every notion about how something “has been done” is thrown out, and a new way of image-making reflects a fresh, young generation.
Matthew Brandt, labeled by Forbes as one of the “Top 30 Under 30 in Art and Design,” is one such catalyst for change.
The Columbus Museum of Art is hosting the Los Angeles artist’s first solo museum exhibition.
As demonstrated by the 18 works on view, Brandt loosely defines the term photography and creates works all about manipulation.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Many of the pieces contain three clear parts: a photograph of a landscape containing a body of water or a cityscape, an unexpected material that encroaches on the photo’s surface and a yielding of the image to the material. The result is a dance between the control and precision of the photo and the element of chance introduced by the unexpected substance.
And I do mean unexpected.
On the list of materials: lake water, bubble gum, gelatin, gummy bears, honeybees and dust.
The exhibit opens with a series of several landscapes featuring specific lakes. Each photo has been soaked in the water of the lake for a few days or up to a few months. The resulting image is less about the photo and more about the process.
In step with the scale consistent throughout the exhibit, Mary’s Lake, MT 7 is large. Pools of blue created by soaking the photo in lake water are impossible to tell from the blue of the lake pictured. The overall distress of the photo is underscored by the chromatic explosion recorded on the surface.
The technique, perhaps Brandt’s reaction to the history of landscape painting and photography, is ingenious.
Then there are the buildings. These photos are processed with the dust of the demolition or renovation of each particular building. The “Superior Court” series chronicles a day in 2008 when one building was photographed from the four cardinal directions. Dust from the building’s renovation is used to process the photo, giving the image a ghostly character.
Mather’s Department Store taps into the documentary nature of photography. Brandt snapped an image of the building at its demolition, then applied dust from the ruins to the image.
The “Taste Tests in Color” series uses the same photo three times, appropriating the Vernal Falls vantage point that Ansel Adams used in a photo of Yosemite National Park. Brandt coats the photographed, then silk-screened image with a candy- store aisle’s worth of sugar and psychedelic colors.
All of his works — especially the landscapes — prompt one to ask: Since when did photography become so tactile? Since now.
Brandt’s exhibit reads less like a question and more like a statement.
This is contemporary photography.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
By Julie Bramowitz November 15, 2013
Discovering hundreds of dead honeybees on a California beach would be an unlucky omen for most, but for Los Angeles photogra- pher Matthew Brandt, it was a sign to return to the studio, honeybees in tow. The result: a set of gum-bichromate prints that literally placed his subjects into the picture. “Photography’s always been an unruly medium based on experimentation and playing with pro- cess,” says curator Catherine Evans, who organized “Sticky/Dusty/Wet,” Brandt’s first one-person museum exhibition opening today at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. “But the more I know about Matthew’s work, the more complex and fascinating it becomes, both exuberant and steeped in history.”
In another set of images on view at CMA, Brandt again incorporates the physical world, soaking landscapes with the water of the lakes and reservoirs he photographed to produce liquid hallucinations awash in psychedelic hues of electric violet and acid yellow. “Visually stunning and stylistically diverse,” notes Evans, “each series has its own perceptual handle.”
Across the pond at Paris Photo (on through November 17), the artist’s L.A. gallery, M+B, has been briskly selling new work from its booth at the Grand Palais, including a variation on Brandt’s architectural photographs comprised of collected dust. His latest iterations resurrect Irving Gill’s Dodge House—a midcentury West Hollywood landmark demolished in 1970—in a fine film of soot from the apartments that replaced it.
Next month, M+B will stage its own solo show for Brandt, “Stars, Dust, Bubble Wrap,” marking a move towards the figurative with his series of silkscreened-velvet bodies. In January, the Cooper Union and UCLA-trained 31-year-old will share wall space with Gerhard Richter, James Welling, Marco Breuer, and Alison Rossiter in “What is a Photograph?” at New York’s International Center of Photog- raphy.
With a few minutes to spare before dashing off to see another one of his pieces at the Palais de Tokyo, the easygoing Californian spoke from Paris about his process and what he's up to next.
JULIE BRAMOWITZ: How's Paris?
MATTHEW BRANDT: I got in yesterday. I've caught up with jetlag, so I'm not too sleepy, but I just did have a glass of wine. I saw Pierre Huyghe's show at the Pompidou, which is amazing. I did some cheesy stuff, too. I've been here before but I'm with my girlfriend, so we saw the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées, all that stuff. We couldn't resist. I kind of want to get back to L.A. because there's a show a coming up and still a lot of work to do. But this is a nice little break.
BRAMOWITZ: Do you ever work on the road?
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
BRANDT: A lot of the photographing is on the road. Usually a project stems from when I'll go to a place and get interested in something. Being out of the city, that's where you gather material to work with, and then you bring it to the studio and chisel it out or massage it into something. I did gather a bunch of dust from Chicago.
BRAMOWITZ: Could you explain?
BRANDT: For the "Dust" series, I've been collecting pictures from public libraries around the United States, focusing in particular on buildings that have been demolished. Then I search the images and get the rights to use them. I go to the site where it exists now, which is usually something different, a newer establishment like a Whole Foods. I'll sweep the location, collecting dust and making gum-bichromate prints of the old photographs with Wwhat's been swept from the place that's there now.
BRAMOWITZ: How much dust do you collect for one image?
BRANDT: Actually, you don't need that much. You'd be surprised. To make something that has some sort of pigment doesn't require tons of dust. An eighth of a Ziploc bag is enough for a big print. And it's pretty easy to collect dust. Even places that look really clean, once you start sweeping, it's there.
BRAMOWITZ: My apartment might be a good place to start.
BRANDT: Yeah, exactly. Like, "I'd like to commission a piece. Don't forget under the bed."
BRAMOWITZ: I was intrigued by some of the other materials listed on the press release for your upcoming gallery show at M+B, including hair dye and torsos.
BRANDT: Oh, yeah. [laughs] The show that I'm working on now for M+B was loosely about gathering materials from where my studio is in Hollywood. What led to that in a lot of ways was working with velvet. Trying to make velvet pictures because I like the inherent baggage that velvet painting comes with, like kitschy, Velvet Elvis. Those kinds of connotations. Doing some other pieces out of velvet, I learned about this burn-out process. What I've been doing is silk-screening this acid material on the velvet and it eats away or carbonizes it, and then you have to wash it off and do a process to get rid of that. What's left are some recessed cavities, so it's sort of like taking away the picture.
BRAMOWITZ: How did you choose the torsos in your velvet burn-out photos?
BRANDT: They're just people that I've been interacting with in the area. One is someone who helps me at the studio, one of them is my dad, and one of them is someone I don't know. But usually it's like, "Hey, you've got a striped shirt on. Can I take a picture of your shirt?" And it's pretty straightforward. There's not an overarching theme, like, "These are all people with the name John."
BRAMOWITZ: As a Los Angeles native, have you always been interested in Hollywood kitsch?
BRANDT: Yeah, I think it's embedded in my psyche. The studio that I have now was my dad's and then in the past five or so years I took it over from him. He's been the longest tenant there. Maybe 27 years. He's a commercial photographer, so I grew up working in the studio, sort of being his assistant on these big photo jobs. I've never consciously thought about it, but just being in Hollywood, seeing the underbelly of how things are made, seeing the ad afterwards, I'm sure it's influenced the way I think about image making. There's always a certain level of presentation and packaging. Making pictures in Hollywood sounds like such a cheesy cliché and it's sort of funny to say that. But sometimes I get a little embarrassed.
BRAMOWITZ: Did you start taking photos as a child?
BRANDT: I don't think I took pictures or even took photography seriously until probably halfway into school at Cooper Union. My portfolio for Cooper was just all drawing and painting. Even when I would be working as my dad's assistant, people would ask, "Are you going to be a photographer when you grow up?" and I was like "No way." I always thought of photography as a trade.
BRAMOWITZ: So what changed?
BRANDT: I started looking at a lot of artists who have used photography, educating myself on the history of photography and its relation to art. I also naturally had a knack for it because I understood F-stops and speeds and strobes from working for my dad, who would get mad at me if I didn't do something right.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
BRAMOWITZ: While you were still at art school, who were some of the artists whose work changed your ideas about the medium?
BRANDT: One person who really influenced the way I think about photography was Walid Raad, who I studied with at Cooper. He creates a whole context for making photographs, giving a reason for the photograph to exist. It's just really beautiful work exploring the ambiguities of the civil war in Lebanon. Studying with Hans Haacke at Cooper really influenced me because there's a different dialogue when you're not talking about dodging and burning. I would bring a photograph in and rather than saying, "It's pretty and it does this and that," you're backing up, asking "Why is this a photograph? Why does this even exist?"
BRAMOWITZ: Back to the dust pictures. There's something haunted and noir-ish about them.
BRANDT: The very first dust photographs I was took were all four sides of these corporate structures. I don't know if you have them in New York, but they're pretty prevalent in the San Diego area. They look like a big rectangle but with one-way mirrors that sort of reflect the landscape. In theory they're supposed to keep out sunlight and be temperature controlled, but it's this kind of creepy panopticon situation where they can see you but you can't see them.
BRAMOWITZ: You said you don't need that much dust to make a dust picture, but on average, how long does it take to produce a piece?
BRANDT: I get that question a lot. I never have a good idea right then and there, and I work more inductively versus deductively, if that makes sense. You learn the technique, but then you start to play around with the material. For instance, I printed pictures of trees out of trees and to do everything, to make paper out of wood, the burning of charcoal for the pigment, that project dated three years. Usually the material will end up very different once I get my hands dirty. But on a basic technical level, it's probably about a couple days to print a dust photo. There are a lot of steps, but I've gotten pretty good at them. I know where I can cheat and where I can't.
BRAMOWITZ: Do you always use the same camera?
BRANDT: No, it's all different. I'm sort of embarrassed to say but I just got the new iPhone and most of those velvets were done with the iPhone camera.
BRAMOWITZ: Since you used to work on his sets, does your dad now have input about what you're doing?
BRANDT: Definitely. He's very helpful because he has ideas of beauty, which I think I sometimes neglect. I'll think too much about the idea and get lost in it. In a way he does help me think about the final outcome. He's very much of a formalist, so he wants to see the beautiful, crisp, black—you know, like the zoning theory in the black-and-white print. It's nice to have that classical filter, or at least to consider it.
BRAMOWITZ: Where are you looking when you do historical research?
BRANDT: I've been working on some heliographs, which is another project. I first started making them exactly how Joseph Nicéphore Niépce did in the late 1700s. He used a tar material, which was bitumen of Judea, and then rubbed it on pewter plate, let that dry, and put that in the camera. The tar is light sensitive, so it dries in certain areas where UV light hits it, and then he would wash it in lavender oil. It's a very simple process when you think about it. Now I'm doing the same thing, but using instead the La Brea Tar Pits as the tar. And then I'm making pictures of the—sorry, I was about to say dinosaurs, but they're not dinosaurs—the prehistoric animal skeletons from the tar pits. I usually learn about a process and then tinker with it to figure out the appropriate way to represent it for a project.
BRAMOWITZ: Is there anything you've experimented with that just didn't work?
BRANDT: There's so many things. But I look at them as projects in process. I tried to make my own photograph out of silver gelatin and pulp and paper, like an actual silver gelatin print but handmade. It's just really hard to make the paper not dissolve in the developer. I would love to make a silver print with actual chunks of silver, which I guess maybe I could. I tried to make silver crystals. Those are really beautiful, but they just don't last when you take them out of the silver. They look like nasty matted hair. Like if you took a shower and you didn't do anything and your hair was wet and you just left it for two years, it would look like silver crystals. Which is kind of gross. But they look really beautiful when they're at their prime. I've been trying to make pictures out of crystals, too. It's just they're so fragile. But maybe one day.
"STICKY/DUSTY/WET" IS ON VIEW AT THE COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART THROUGH MARCH 9, 2014. "STARS, DUST, BUBBLE WRAP," IS ON VIEW AT M+B IN LOS ANGELES FROM DECEMBER 14 THROUGH JANUARY 18, 2014. "WHAT IS A PHOTOGRAPH?" IS ON VIEW AT THE INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN NEW YORK FROM JANUARY 31, 2014 THROUGH MAY 4 612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
The interesting, innovative approach to old photographic processes and the art that results from Brandt's patient hand (some images sit for months as they develop) has garnered the 31-year-old a lot of attention. The magazine Hollywood Reporter recently tapped Brandt as one of California's top 10 artists to watch, and the Columbus Museum of Art is hosting Brandt's first solo museum exhibition. The exhibit includes pieces from his “Honeybees,” “Lakes and Reservoirs,” “Taste Tests and Colors,” and “Dust” series.
"I've been making things for a long time but this is the first time it's got to this level of acknowledgement," said Brandt, admittedly a little befuddled with his art’s new high demand. "It seems like a little more is at stake. I feel a little more responsibility. ... The ultimate thing is to not compromise the art at the end of the day."
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Arts previews: The Columbus Museum of Art hosts the first solo exhibition of L.A. photographer-on-the-rise. By Jackie Mantey From the November 14, 2013 edition
Like most good things, photographer Matthew Brandt's artistic claim to fame began with bodily fluids.
While working on a portraiture project in grad school at UCLA, Brandt started developing his images using the subject's vomit, snot, spit, et al.
"Every bodily fluid except for, like, spinal fluid," said Brandt via phone from L.A. "The fluid reflected them in one way or another. It was an interesting play between subject and material... [This technique] was a way to get closer to them. I know that's a cheesy way to think of those photos but I can't help it. It was like a collaboration with the subject. It also became a study of what fluids worked well on a basic technical photographic level."
Those investigations have become the cornerstone for Brandt's work. The artist uses elements from the subjects he photographs in the process of developing their images — emulsified bee carcasses for a gum bichromate series of photos of dead bees, killed from colony collapse and collected from their sandy beachside grave; lake water for landscape portraits; Bubblicious Grape for photos of a waterfall; dust for an atrophying building; and (for work he's currently making) hair dye, bubble wrap, velvet and cocaine for images of iconic Hollywood attractions.
"I'm always learning from the materials, always trying to be observant," said Brandt, who has a collection of curiosities in his studio of things he has collected to perhaps inspire a later project; a jar of dead skin flakes, for example.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Rogue Wave 2013 at L.A. Louver August 15, 2013 Written by Catlin Moore
Installation View, Rogue Wave, 2013. Courtesy of L.A. Louver It’s July in Los Angeles, and as every hokey reality television show portrays, the beach beckons. I pass barefoot teenagers hustling toward the Venice promenade, Boogie boards in tow, and a motley crew of sand-encrusted terriers out for a midday stroll. My hands are already sticky from the brined air as I reach for the door of L.A. Louver—a gallery that has been situated in this coastal borough since 1975 but that still prioritizes the production of exhibitions reflective of industry sea change. The Rogue Wave series is the hallmark of the gallery’s investment in currents beyond those of the water, aim- ing to tease out the trends, techniques, and aesthetics of art made in Los Angeles at present. Now in its fifth installment, Rogue Wave 2013 features fifteen local artists—an ambitious survey curated by Chief Preparator Christopher Pate and Founding Director Peter Goulds—who are diverse in media but comparable in their collective interest in a process-driven practice. From painterly abstraction to durational photography, the vast majority of works in Rogue Wave 2013 substantiate the claim that Los Angeles houses an ever-rising tide of emerging talent.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Arguably, not all of the featured artists in the exhibition are expressly rogue, but it is this intersection of nascent and esteemed careers that gives Rogue Wave its signif- icance. Recent MFA graduates are placed in conversation with artists collected by dozens of public institutions, yet commonalities in both concept and process can eas- ily be extrapolated: forbearance is at risk, instant gratification is fruitless, and social cognizance is not synonymous with unedited dissemination. We can all agree that our ideas about time are becoming increasingly disparate as technology and globalism march forward, a concern manifested through the equally diverse paintings, drawings, installations, photographs, and sculptures installed throughout the gallery’s exhibition space. Though each artist in the exhibition affords a valuable contribution to this analy- sis, I found particular resonance with the work from five particular artists: Sarah Awad, Matthew Brandt, Asad Faulwell, Owen Kydd, and Eric Yahnker.
Awad’s voluptuous, harlequin forms deliver us to a fauvist yesteryear—rife with the sensory romanticism of loose curves and capricious brushstrokes. Her figures are paused in heedless repose, as if wholly engrossed in the finer details of their physicality and being. A sharp contrast to the contemporary desire for uniformity and idealism, Awad’s women appear at peace with their vulnerability—creating a kind of epicurean mood that is both alluring and intimidating.
Matthew Brandt, Rainbow Lake WY 1, 2013, C-print soaked in Rainbow Lake water, 72 x 105 in. Courtesy of L.A. Louver
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
During a period in which haste is king, Brandt actively works toward deceleration. He is process-oriented to the point of complete absorption—in the most literal sense. Brandt’s images of lakes and reservoirs appear as scorched or hallucinatory land- scapes, a result achieved by submerging his C-prints in the water pulled from the depicted pool itself. In Brandt’s hands, the subject becomes the material as well as the procedure, resulting in sublime abstractions that bespeak a performative aspect to his technique, as well as the human act of recollection.
Faulwell’s intricate portraiture of female freedom fighters from the 1950s and 1960s are obsessively elaborate in their detail. An amalgamation of the textures and patterns found in Moroccan textiles, mosaics, and embroidery, Faulwell’s radiant embellishment serves as a stark contrast to the ghostly, hollow-eyed women he renders. His frenetic ornamentation celebrates their unheralded magnificence, at once paying homage to both their complex political affiliations and the popular expectations of feminine domestic craftsmanship. By immortalizing their narratives in ornate acrylic paint, paper, and pins, Faulwell conjures a past that delineates an eerily topical present.
In an adept fusion of new media art and early still life photography, Kydd’s durational photographs deny the stagnant nature of the archival. Presented on digital monitors, Kydd’s still-life compositions capture movement at a nearly indiscernible pace, giving a subtle illusive quality to everyday objects. Requiring the rapt attention and focus of the viewer, Kydd’s work challenges the increasingly dismissive and impatient nature of our modern culture, thus reactivating the tradition of mindful art viewing and intellectual presence.
Yahnker’s faithful (but comically warped) colored pencil reproductions of historical and pop-cultural icons hide a bitter pill just beneath a deliciously farcical surface. Of the two works featured in this exhibition, Epiphany (The King Grabs Crotch) (2013) feels astutely apropos; a midthrust Michael Jackson seamlessly interjected into Jacob Jordaens’s seventeenth-century Flemish baroque painting, The King Drinks. Surrounded by unruly and voracious guests of a bygone Christmas feast, the self-declared “King of Pop” appears a simultaneously glorified and tragic monarch—a testament to how quickly the unforgiving tides of popular reverence can turn. Perhaps it is this sentiment that is most shrewdly evident in Rogue Wave 2013, be it clearly delineated or hinted at with an elegant minimalism. The ebb and flow of demand and critical proclamation may prove tempestuous, but the artists featured in this exhibition prove that with enough creative perseverance, one can stay afloat long enough to see the horizon. For Angelenos, it looks quite promising.
Rogue Wave is on view at L.A. Louver through August 23, 2013.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 2013 Media Contact: Christina Carlos Telephone: 310-822-4955 Email: [email protected] 2013 15 ARTISTS FROM LOS ANGELES
SARAH AWAD PETER HOLZHAUER HEATHER GWEN MARTIN MATTHEW BRANDT FARRAH KARAPETIAN CHRISTOPHER MILES KENT FAMILTON LAURA KRIFKA ALISON O’DANIEL ASAD FAULWELL OWEN KYDD KIM SCHOENSTADT SHERIN GUIRGUIS ASHLEY LANDRUM ERIC YAHNKER
18 JULY - 23 AUGUST 2013 Reception for the artists: Thursday, 18 July, 6-9 pm
Venice, CA -- L.A. Louver is pleased to announce Rogue Wave 2013. This group exhibition includes 15 artists whose work encapsulates the vibrancy and excitement of art being made in Los Angeles today. Co- curated by the gallery’s Chief Preparator Christopher Pate and Founding Director Peter Goulds, this is the fifth group exhibition in L.A. Louver’s ongoing Rogue Wave program. Painting, drawing, photography and installation will be on view throughout L.A. Louver’s first and second floor galleries, Skyroom and exterior spaces.
Painter Sarah Awad depicts female nudes poised in classical form, taking an abstract and unabashed approach to color and brushwork.
Photographer Matthew Brandt pushes the chemical processes of the darkroom and commercial printing to dramatic effect by incorporating water sourced directly from his landscape subjects.
Abstract painter Kent Familton combines a muted color palette and poetic line work with a sophistication of composition and form.
In his paintings, Asad Faulwell pays reverence to the unsung female freedom fighters who took arms against the French occupation of Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, adorning them with elaborate motifs and collage elements reminiscent of Moroccan and Persian textiles.
Sherin Guirguis reinterprets Arabic patterning in hand-cut paper works emblazoned with ink and watercolor in bold and brilliant marks, as well as an intricately perforated large-scale wood sculpture.
Peter Holzhauer’s black-and-white, exquisitely crafted photographs document fragments of the personal, the textural and the urban, with sensitive visual acuity.
Merging sculpture and photography, Farrah Karapetian stages elaborate, life-sized photograms that ghostly silhouette soldiers in the midst of combat, accompanied with a display of military weaponry cast in resin.
Rooted in Renaissance tradition, Laura Krifka’s paintings and sculptures portray the human body with awkward vulnerability in mysterious, often psychosexual vignettes. In defiance of still photography, Owen Kydd composes “durational photographs,” object-oriented video works that capture the subtle movements of his subjects over a sustained span of time.
Sculptor Ashley Landrum fabricates minimal geometrical structures of wood and metal tubing, with segments concealed by patterned steel panels and fabrics.
Painting on a large scale, Heather Gwen Martin creates tension and movement between vibrant color forms that bend across luminous linen surfaces.
Materials are celebrated in Christopher Miles’ ceramic sculptures, as well as in a larger work constructed of paper, paint and aluminum tubing, comprising gnarled biomorphic forms dripping in layers of thick color.
Sculptor, filmmaker and performance artistAlison O’Daniel creates sculptural wall reliefs embellished with delicate metal chain. These works are inspired by the musical score commissioned for her second feature film, “The Tuba Thieves,” the first segment of which will be projected in L.A. Louver’s South Gallery.
Kim Schoenstadt fuses architectural renderings, social interaction and geometric abstraction to produce a site-specific mural to cover the exterior walls of the gallery’s Skyroom. A painting on panel with three- dimensional elements will be installed in the gallery’s entryway.
A former cartoonist, Eric Yahnker reappropriates and combines popular cultural icons through highly detailed and realistic drawings in a form of satirical comedy.
Rogue Wave was initiated in 2001 as a group survey exhibition examining Los Angeles-based artists, with additional editions presented in 2005, 2007 and 2009. Following this cycle, L.A. Louver launched Rogue Wave Projects, resulting in solo exhibitions with Eduardo Sarabia (2009), Olga Koumoundouros (2010) and Matt Wedel (2010). At the start of 2013, we undertook our first internationalRogue Wave Projects exhibition with Australian new media artist Grant Stevens. L.A. Louver’s next international project will feature work by Beijing-based photographer and artist Chen Man, in January 2014. To learn more about Rogue Wave and past projects, please visit: www.roguewaveprojects.com.
Thursday Night Artist Talks, 6:30 pm
During Rogue Wave 2013, L.A. Louver will host weekly artist talks every Thursday night at 6:30 pm, providing visitors the opportunity to walk through the exhibition spaces with the artists, as they speak about their work.
25 July: Sherin Guirguis / Owen Kydd / Kim Schoenstadt 1 August: Asad Faulwell / Peter Holzhauer / Alison O’Daniel 8 August: Laura Krifka / Ashley Landrum / Heather Gwen Martin 15 August: Kent Familton / Christopher Miles / Eric Yahnker 22 August: Sarah Awad / Matthew Brandt / Farrah Karapetian
As space is limited, reservations are recommended. Please RSVP to (310) 822-4955 or [email protected].
For more information and visuals, contact Christina Carlos, L.A. Louver, 45 North Venice Boulevard, Venice, CA, USA tel: 310-822-4955; fax: 310-821-7529; web www.lalouver.com; email: [email protected]
L.A. LOUVER SUMMER HOURS (8 July - 23 August 2013) Monday-Friday: 10am-6pm / Thursdays: 10am-8pm / or by appointment
FOLLOW US ON: BLOG.LALOUVER.COM /LALOUVER beauty in the break down
text ROSS GARDINER photo RACHEL MANY As you peer over the labyrinth of silicon circuit boards through the LCD display at the pixelated representations of the world, you might wonder if landscape photography has lost some of its connection between man and nature since it went digital. While it has always been about capturing those tranquil moments of wonder with a little memory machine, The results are striking. The serenity of the digital development has reduced man’s role in the lakes is destroyed in a variety of ways, from gentle proceedings, and, in a sense, has demoted the burns and opaque veils of transparent color, to vibrantly eventual image to being something that can be easily mangled abstract images that offer little clues as to manipulated, and ultimately more disposable. Since what they once were. The whole production stands as the photography world grew weary of the irksome an unlikely merging of science, art, synthetics, nature, burden of the dark room and snuggled into the warm technology and organics. It’s recklessly experimental, embrace of Lightroom, most of the images we see of like a heretic mother drinking gin whilst pregnant in the natural world have been snapped, processed, and the hope that her offspring develops synesthesia. are communicated via digital mediums, and are rarely “There are a lot of mistakes,” he professes, as tangible beyond their corresponding ‘Like’ button. we stand over an enormous, beautiful Oregon lake, slowly LA-based artist Matthew Brandt’s hands are being molested by the mixture he’d crafted in the bucket intimately involved in every stage of his photographic below. “You learn from them, but there is always going to be an element of unpredictability to this whole thing.” production. Take his much lauded Lakes and Reservoirs series: Brandt hikes to a large body of isolated water, Born and raised in Los Angeles, Brandt takes his shot, collects a pale of water from the lake, was raised on an eclectic mixture of art, spirituality and returns to his Hollywood studio to start processing. and culture. His father is a successful commercial Using an ever changing mixture of unfiltered lake water photographer, and his mother, originally from Hong and stop-bath processing chemicals, he develops the Kong, is a strong proponent of Buddhist values and photographs in his makeshift dark room. how they manifest themselves in the modern world. He graduated from the esteemed Cooper Union art school in New York, before gaining his MFA from UCLA in 2008. Along the way he has been building a reputation for creating some of the most conceptually challenging and visually arresting works in the country.
MATTHEWBRANDT.COM MBART.COM there is always going to be an element of unpredictability to this whole thing. ” A quick glance at his website reveals his Highly conceptual, and undeniably extensive collection of gallery works, ranging from technically gifted, Matthew Brandt is a hugely exciting screen-printed, electrically charged copper images of young talent in the world of abstract photography. Mao’s birthplace, to an assortment of dead honey bees His thematic battles between nature and technology, dissected and reformed on canvas. In his studio you expansion and retraction, as well as his earnest can see works that may or may not ever see the white fascination with the torch of power being passed of the gallery walls. Decomposing burgers in glass between China and America, are the lifeblood of boxes, compressed masks of prominent politicians, his work. Beyond the immediate aesthetic pull, his and photographic/painting replicas of the invisible photography maintains a depth and cultural relevance men of cinema. The list, honestly, goes on and on. that time will surely only serve to strengthen.
And given that he is but thirty years old, it will surely Matthew Brandt’s work can be seen in the Rogue Wave continue to do so at this rapid rate. ’13 collective show at LA Louver Gallery in Venice, from July 18th to August 24th.
50UNDER 50 NEXT MOST COLLECTIBLE ARTISTS
CAROL BOVE The market for Bove s meditative assemblages painstakingly arranged objects such as driftwood and carefully selected books took a turn upward in 2011 when it was announced her NGELES
longtime gallery, Maccarone, would A
co represent her in New York with David OS XX, L XX,
Zwirner. The deal quickly expanded the O artist s international reach: After presenting her work at Art Basel Miami Beach, Zwirner sold a sculpture to Mexico s Colecci n Jumex, and the ON, AND M ARC F ON D
galleries coproduced Bove s sprawling , L
installation at Documenta (13). It s ORA good for her career, art adviser Lisa Schiff says of the novel arrangement. M ORVI
Staying with Michele [Maccarone] , C YORK
lets her keep her edge she s not going EW
vanilla. (Bove is also represented Y, N MATTHEW BRANDT by Georg Kargl, in Vienna.) In addition GALLER Brandt transmutes photography through unconventional materials, but with a meta twist: Portraits of friends and family to making pieces for a solo show at ERN are printed using their own sweat and tears; his Honeybees series uses victims of a found colony collapse to make an Maccarone this fall, Bove is at work emulsion for resulting photographs. A former assistant to photographer Robert Polidori and a UCLA MFA student under James on six new sculptures to be shown at the Welling, the 31 year old Brandt centers his conceptual body of work on archaic photographic processes like gum bichromate Museum of Modern Art, along with a
prints. He has tremendous knowledge of the history of photography and such enthusiasm for what he s doing, says New seventh from the museum s collection, K OLLIER , A NTON York gallerist Yossi Milo, who placed pieces from Brandt s first solo show at the gallery with the Brooklyn Museum and this summer. Sculptures and the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year. (Brandt is also represented by M+B, in Los Angeles.) Works from his Lakes installations cost up to $300,000, and Reservoirs series images soaked in water taken from the bodies they depict met with clamorous success at while paintings, including a new, ON ; A NNE C ON D fairs, selling at prices from $5,600 to $20,000. Brandt s mining of the medium, melded with environmental concerns, sought after series that incorporates
has resulted in his first institutional solo show, at the Columbus Museum of Art this fall. SPH | CRACKLING LAKE WY 1, 2012. peacock feathers, range from $75,000 AN D L
JH | VIVA, 2011. MIXED YORK CHROMOGENIC PRINT SOAKED IN LAKE WATER, 72 X 105 IN. to $175,000. MEDIA, 6 X 10¼ X 1 FT.
ANNE COLLIER A rigorous descendant VI D Z WIRNER , N EW
of the 1970s and 80s DA
Pictures Generation, AND Collier photographs YORK books, magazines, and ephemera in curious and unexpected compositions. Anne is going to prove to be one of the , N EW ; M ACCARONE NGELES
most important A OS photographers of her generation, says
Phillips specialist Benjamin Godsill. She has an ability to find subtle L AN D M+B, variances and changes and track them in a way that s not documentary DT RAN and dry but sexy and seductive. Collier s career has seen a marked acceleration in the past few years. She nabbed New York s High Line billboard commission in February 2012, was included in the Museum of Modern Art s New Photography series the same year, and has solo museum exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Modern Institute, in Glasgow, on deck for 2014. Marc Foxx, in Los Angeles, Anton Kern, in New York, and Corvi Mora, in London, represent her work, which has fetched up to $27,500 at auction. RACHEL WOLFF | DEVELOPING TRAY #2
(GREY), 2009. C PRINT, 43 X 52½ IN. B M ATTHEW LEFT: FROM TOP CLOCKWISE
ART+AUCTION JUNE 2013 | BLOUINARTINFO.COM
Top Finds at Paris Photo Los Angeles By Colin Westerbeck May 16, 2013
Like Art Basel, which branched out from Basel to Miami in 2002 and will add Art Basel Hong Kong this month, Paris Photo established a new venue this year with Paris Photo Los Angeles. The fair, which will have its 17th edition in France in November, chose Paramount Pictures Studios in Hollywood as its L.A. beachhead. Each gallery represented there was in either a booth on one of three enormous sound stages or a storefront built into one of the period facades on the New York City back lot. In keeping with this setting, Paris Photo director Julien Frydman devoted a section of the fair to screenings of experimental films and encouraged exhibitors to explore the interface between still photography and the moving image today.
Digital technology has made the distinction between a photograph and a video clip shakier than it used to be. This ambiguity was turned into an attention-grabbing conundrum at several galleries, among them Catherine Edelman Gallery (Chicago) and Gallery K.O.N.G. (Seoul). At Edelman's booth, frames hung on the wall contained, instead of a photograph, a flat screen on which artist Gregory Scott appeared in a gallery setting, watching himself install paintings there. In a sequence titled Inside Rothko, the gallery wall has a rectangle cut out of it, behind which Scott meticulously mounts a Rothko painting so that it will look to us as if it's on the wall. A few minutes later, he walks around to the front of the wall, peers into the painting, and then steps through it as if it were a James Turrell light scrim rather than a Rothko.
Judging by the crowd around a comparable still/video piece at K.O.N.G., Leenam Lee's Mountain Villa and Lofty Recluse (2012), people found that work even more mesmerizing. Here too, a frame on the wall contained a flat screen—a vertical one on which an ancient Chinese landscape painting came to life as artisans worked in little shops, wayfarers passed along a mountain road and a canoe was paddled ashore on a lake. All the while, the landscape blossomed with brilliantly colored spring foliage that turned into the full bloom of summer, faded with coming of autumn, and finally reverted to monochrome in the winter snow. Grace K.H. Kong told me that this was the only one left of five she had brought, each priced at a bit over $30,000.00.
The Parisian Galerie DIX9 had video only. One of the pieces, Sophia Poméry's Still Water (2010), shows a hand dipping a thick calligraphy brush into clear water and slathering it on a table top. There the water transformed into an enigmatic picture but turned back into a puddle again as it dried up.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
While these pieces were scene stealers, still photographs dominated. Last November, Paris Photo had over 120 booths whose contents spanned the history of photography. Paris Photo Los Angeles, with half the exhibitors and an emphasis on contemporary work, offered a more coherent experience. It showed the art of photography to be in an upbeat mood. Video is not usurping the place of photography; the distinction between photography and other media is being blurred in a way that enlarges photography itself.
If an expansion by still photographers into moving pictures is one example of such enlargement, the preoccupation of photographers with the history of painting is another. A painterly tour de force on view at the Paris's Galerie Pièce Unique was Hiroyuki Masuyama's 2012 recreation of the 19th-century landscape painting Veduta di cava l'Avvocatella, by Giacinto Gigante. This was a luminous photograph not on a flat screen, but on an LED lightbox, where the painting's composition of two men standing in a Romantic setting was recreated with real people in period costume standing in the actual locale. Predominantly, however, the painting theme at Paris Photo Los Angeles took the form of abstraction rather than figuration.
Another of Scott's videos was of skeins of color being thrown onto a white ground, turning it into a Jackson Pollock, until a knife starts cutting it up in pieces and we realize the colors were icing on a sheet cake. More earnest and serious were the examples of still photography's embrace of abstraction seen at the upscale L.A. gallery Regen Projects. Four of the six photographers on the gallery's roster—James Welling, Willem de Rooij, Marilyn Minter and Walead Beshty—were represented by pure abstractions, and the other two, Catherine Opie and Doug Aitken, give a very abstracted treatment to recognizable subjects.
The same was true of the most recent piece by Matthew Brandt on view at L.A.'s M+B Gallery. This 2013 expressionist abstraction of Brandt's, Blacktail Lake WY 4, represents a new phase in a series that has attracted considerable attention. It exemplifies yet another way in which photography is expanding its horizons, since Brandt has been trying to get beyond the mere representation of his subjects by incorporating the material of the subject matter into the photographic process. The large abstraction had been soaked in water from the lake itself. Earlier attempts included portraits into whose processing the bodily fluids of the subjets were mixed.
Other examples of this desire to incorporate reality into one's photography could be found. New York dealer Andrea Meislin had a piece by the Israeli photographer Ilit Azoulay, Tree for Too One (2010), that was a totally digital collage of disparate subjects made to look as if they'd been assembled on a wall. In order to muddy the issue of what was real here and what was a computer-generated mirage, Azoulay had inserted a few rough-cast patches of plaster into the surface of the piece.
Chris McCaw is a pioneer in such metaphysics. In his "Sunburn" series, he's been working in the interface between mere imagery and physical reality for a decade. Stephen Wirtz Gallery (San Francisco) had a 2013 example; done on "unique gelatin silver paper negatives," this image of the sun traversing the sky was so severely solarized that the subject had burned an arch-shaped slit through all four of the pieces of photographic paper. McCaw came upon this effect by accident when, while trying to make an all-night exposure of the stars on a camping trip, he drank too much whiskey and failed to wake up in time to close the lens before sunrise. As a result, the sun burned a hole in his negative.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Alison Rossiter, at the booth of New York dealer Yossi Milo, works with photographic paper that is well past its expiration date, sometimes by as much as 100 years. Each of her black-and-white abstractions was printed on a Belgian paper that expired sometime around 1940 and was made up of four sheets in a grid, the edges of each sheet curled by its age and the rigors of Rossiter's post-mortem processing. The pieces were in effect low relief sculptures in the same way that McCaw's was where the sun had burned through the paper and warped it. John Chiara's abstract direct positives at L.A.'s Rose Gallery were similarly misshapen prints. The artist uses a room-sized camera obscura so large it takes a flatbed truck to transport it to the landscapes that are Chiara’s subjects.
Some extraordinary examples of vintage work were also on view. The largest single group, shown by the Parisian Galerie 1900-2000, were 30 prints made by the Surrealist Man Ray before World War II. Patricia Conde Galería from Mexico City had a single pre-war masterpiece by Hungarian photographer Kati Horna, primarily known as an associate of the photojournalist Robert Capa. In this gem, Horna superimposed a self-portrait on an ancient Spanish building in such a way that her eye was trapped behind the prisonlike bars on a window. New York's Howard Greenberg Gallery offered two other vintage surprises from photographers I thought I already knew all about. In a group of familiar Robert Frank pictures from the 1950s published in his book The Americans was a single print I'd never seen, of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon together in the days before either was president. Likewise, an adjacent wall of prints by recently discovered street photographer Vivian Maier included another image I hadn't come across before—a grocery window display with a pair of feet amidst stacks of canned vegetables—that was perhaps the best image of hers I've ever seen.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
! !
!
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN: ART MATTHEW BRANDT
The Los Angeles photographer makes a knockout solo début in New York with three process-driven series. In each group, the subject of the photograph—a lake, a tree, honeybees—has been quite literally incorporated into the image itself. Pictures of insects swarming against white backdrops were made using the antique gum-bichromate printing process and an emulsion of finely crushed bees. The biggest and most spectacular photographs are landscapes of lakes; each print has been soaked in the water it depicts, with unpredictably abstract results. Like Vik Muniz, Brandt uses unlikely materials to astonishing and invigorating effect. Through July 20.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
WATER WORKS: MATTHEW BRANDT’S EXPERIMENTAL LANDSCAPES Posted by Suzanne Shaheen June 5, 2012
As a student at U.C.L.A., the California photographer Matthew Brandt became fascinated with experimental processes from the dawn of photography. “Daguerreotypes were too dangerous,” he told me, “so I decided to focus on salted-paper printing.” Soon enough, though, Brandt began inventing his processes, and applying them to large-scale studies of the natural world: lakes, honey bees, trees.
When Brandt creates a photograph for his “Lakes and Reservoirs” series, the water itself is part of the process. Out in the field, Brandt takes with him two key tools: a camera, and a five-gallon plastic jug. “The camera is to take an image of the lake or reservoir, while the jugs are to take some of the actual lake,” he explained. When he gets back to his studio, he makes prints of selected images, then empties the water he collected into a large tray. “The c-print of that same lake is then submerged into the tray with the lake’s water,” he said. “From this point I wait for the water to break down its own photographic image. Depending on the image density and water, this breakdown time can take days or weeks.”
Here’s a selection from “Lakes and Reservoirs,” currently on view as part of the larger exhibition “Lakes, Trees and Honeybees” at Yossi Milo gallery.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
The Secret Life of Photographs by Brandt Oscar A. Laluyan - May 30, 2012
Every picture tells a story. When does the actual subject becomes the material placed into the picture to add to the story? Matthew Brandt blew it out of the water literally with an opening reception at Yossi Milo Gallery last May 24, 2012 for his show “Lakes, Trees and Honeybees”.
Arte Fuse caught a preview of Brandt’s work at the Armory Show last March and the image stayed on for a couple of months till the invite to the opening for his first solo exhibition in New York came that it was not to be missed. The gravitas of his work is simply going beyond the tenets of art photography.
This artist uses the physical element from the subject itself. There is a deference and homage to mid-nineteenth century photography of the American West. He employs the tradition of production process of the period by handmade papermaking and gum-bichromate. There is a blurred delineation of the subject being photographed and the actual physical component of it being used to make the picture. It is what makes his work compelling and sublime.
For the Lake and Reservoirs series that he photographs the bodies of water in western United States and submerges the C-Print in water collected from the subject of the photograph. The vibrant treated image comes out representational painterly or vividly abstract. The Trees series were photographed in George Bush Park near Houston, Texas. Brandt took pictures and gathered branches found in the grassy valley of the park. He took them home to California, made paper from it, and burned the remaining to make charcoal for ink. He silkscreened prints using material from the trees itself. Honeybees get the surreal treatment as he collected then photographed them in his studio. Utilizing the gum-bichromate process, Brandt made prints from an emulsion of the bees themselves. The entire body of work is astoundingly clever but it blows your mind that it just can’t be classified as mere photography.
It’s not a surprise that Brandt was named by Forbes Magazine last December 2011 as one of tomorrow’s brightest stars in their article 30 Under 30: Art & Design. Expect more great work from this artist. Brandt’s photographs come to life unexpectedly by his unconventional methods.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
‘Lakes, Trees and Honeybees’: Matthew Brandt at Yossi Milo Gallery Tuesday, May 22, 2012 | By Lily Rothman | @lilyrothman
When photographer Matthew Brandt started studying for his MFA, he began with the earliest forms of photography, immersing himself in the history of the process. Studying at UCLA also allowed him to return to his hometown and catch up with friends and family members; it was only a matter of time before the photography and friendship collided in a series of portraits.
And then the collision furthered: one day, a friend who Brandt was photographing started to cry. Brandt asked for her tears. “I know it seems a little mean but at the time it seemed to make sense,” he says. He had been studying salted paper prints, a very early form of 19th-century photography that requires just salt solution and silver nitrate to add light sensitivity to a piece of paper. The sight of that naturally occurring salt water triggered an idea. He used the tears to create a portrait of his crying friend. “It was like this ‘eureka’ process in the dark room,” Brandt says. “I was like, ‘oh my God, this actually worked.’”
Brandt, whose work will be featured starting May 24 in an exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York City, finished his degree in 2008 but has continued to make photographs using the physical matter of the subject in the development process. The upcoming exhibition Lakes, Trees and Honeybees will include work from three series. For Lakes and Reservoirs, Brandt soaked photographs of lakes in water collected from the subjects, creating unpredictable colorscapes. In Trees, photographs of the title vegetation are
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
printed on paper and with ink made from branches fallen from those very trees. The Honeybees photos are pictures of bees printed with a gum-bichromate process that required using a solution of the bees themselves in the developing process.
These photographs, of their subjects in both senses of the word, also share a certain degree of pathos and a somber tone, says Brandt. Each of the three series is imbued with its own particular sense of loss, a feeling that something is changing, maybe for the worse. The moment captured is one of crisis.
Lakes, for example, while also addressing the more obvious meanings of wetness, highlights the obsolescence of wet photography; color negative paper was becoming hard to get. The Trees series was made right around the time that Brandt graduated from UCLA and George W. Bush left office. The trees photographed are in George Bush Park in Houston; Brandt says he didn’t want to make an overtly political statement but rather to capture a sense of ambivalence about what the future could hold, an uncertainty that he felt in himself and observed on a national level. And Honeybees was made when Colony Collapse Disorder was making news, prompting the photographer to think of the bees as a clue that something was going wrong in the world.
But not everything is changing. The old-fashioned photography processes Brandt uses—not to mention the work involved in making his own paper and ink—are extremely labor-intensive, but Brandt has no plans to take it easy. The photographer, who cites classic American landscape photography as an influence, still sometimes goes hiking with a large-format camera, frequently returning to Yosemite with Ansel Adams in mind. “The guys who would travel with their wagons through these crazy hills—if they put that much work into making a picture, I should do the same,” he says.
Matthew Brandt is a California-based photographer. Lakes, Trees and Honeybees will be on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York City from May 24 – June 30. More of his work can be seen here.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
Best Art I Saw All Week
28, 2011
Matthew Brandt's wall - the
Jackie George
red -
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MATTHEW BRANDT: TWO SHIPS PASSING September 16 – October 29, 2011 Artist’s Opening Reception: Friday, September 16, 2011 from 6 to 8 pm
M+B is pleased to announce Two Ships Passing an exhibition of new work by Matthew Brandt. “Two ships passing” is a common saying describing the possibilities and often-unresolved nature of love and connection. The show’s title borrows from this multi-layered expression—its ambiguity as well as promise of potential—to describe the peculiar interdependency between the United States and China.
At the core of the exhibition stands one particular circumstance: when two vessels pass each other in their domestic waters. Created with their own depicted fluid, two large-scale salted paper prints represent this specific occurrence in both Chinese and American waters. Brandt’s act of juxtaposing this simple circumstance creates a shared cultural meeting point.
At the entrance to the gallery a sign reads, “For your safety do not touch the artwork,” warning visitors of the exposed electrical current running through the etched copper picture planes. These photographs of urban Hunan China, the birthplace of Mao Zedong, are circuit boards. US manufacturers once dominated this technology; today, it is primarily produced in China. The electricity courses through the conduit skirting around large-scale photographs of American Lake in Tacoma, Washington, chromogenic prints soaked in the lake water. The electrical current leads to a single original Edison Company bulb (circa late 1800s), now a symbolic relic of technologic innovation and industrial procedures that have helped define America as a super power. Uninterested in resurrecting arguments about Chinese-US relations, Matthew Brandt creates a platform depicting two places, two bodies, and where they meet.
Born in Los Angeles in 1982, Matthew Brandt received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2004 and MFA from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2008. His work has recently been exhibited in New York, reviewed in The New Yorker, and his precocious talent has landed him in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Armand Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) and the Elton John Collection. Brandt currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
This exhibition is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, a Getty initiative that brings together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California to examine the history of contemporary art in Los Angeles.
Location: M+B, 612 North Almont Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90069 Show Title: Matthew Brandt: Two Ships Passing Exhibition Dates: September 16 – October 29, 2011 Artist’s Reception: Friday, September 16, 2011, 6 – 9 pm Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm, and by appointment
For more info, please contact Shannon Richardson at M+B at (310) 550 – 0050 or [email protected]
# # #
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN: ART “EVERY PHOTO GRAPH IS IN VISIBLE” August 2, 2011
A savvy, compact show of work by three young artists whose photographs, while occasionally gimmicky, are anything but conventional. Christine Nguyen fills one wall with a grid of undeveloped photographic paper that she exposed to a mixture of borax, Epsom salts, and salt; the crusty, corroded results recall Warhol’s piss paintings. Letha Wilson makes ordinary landscape photographs the basis of sculptural objects, the best of which involve a shadowbox frame filled with poured concrete. Matthew Brandt’s pictures of beaches, lakes, and an L.A. office building look straightforward by comparison, until you see that the prints were processed with the materials at hand, including water from the ocean and dust from the office. Through Aug. 12.
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 TEL 310 550 0050 FAX 310 550 0605 WWW.MBART.COM
july 2009 review
LOS ANGELES Matthew Brandt: “Chocolate, Bees, Dust, Sperm & Sprinkles” at Cardwell Jimmerson
For his first solo gallery show, the photographer Matthew Brandt has produced several series that highlight the process and materiality of photography through a strong conceptual frame- work: he links the subjects of his images to their representations through the materials used for their objectification. While light is often the essence of photography, Brandt goes one step further to focus on the liquid substances that are required to develop images. Techniques from the beginning of photography like salted paper, gum bichromate and lenticular printing help underscore the materials at work.
The liquid used to print each picture in his Portraits series is a bodily fluid that either came from the subject or from the subject’s family. Close friends and family are captured by their own DNA. Jordan features a young child, shirtless, cocking his head with just a bit of sly gumption and leaning on the shoulder of a figure to his left, only a small portion of whose arm and leg remain visible. Like all of the images in this series, it is only a few inches high and wide. The print was developed in his father’s sperm. Another feed- back loop is created in his Superior Court Los Angeles Dust series. Dust from a friend’s office in the building forms the basis of the pigment used to print the picture: a bluish-gray hue which, viewed up close, reveals the tiny sticks and bits of crud you’d expect to see in a dustpan. The transformation is unexpected, yet commonsensical: if you’re going to represent something, why not use the actual thing in the process?
Other works, like Unknown Lovers (Ikea Ribba Collection), confound and enrich questions about the link between subject and object. Backing paper from the six sizes of Ikea Ribba frames were photographed and developed in the liquid found in used condoms from a nearby church, and inserted back into their respective frames. The relationships between the uniqueness of what is inside a condom and the commonness of industrial manufacturing are indelibly bound together in the image. Brandt gives the inherent problematics of photography new articulations.
—ANDREW CHOATE Matthew Brandt
www.artltdmag.com Copyright ©2009 Lifescapes Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.