"Idols and Masonry 1" Artwork - Limited Edition of 10

Born 1971, Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA Matt has been creating and showing art out of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas for going on three decades. He has shown in over 25 group shows across the U.S. during this time. His work has been in the areas of Photography (urban landscape and architectural abstraction), ink-wash (abstraction) and drawing (figurative). He is a self-taught artist whose formal education was in the areas of psychology and philosophy. His academic career ended with a thesis on Martin Buber and A.H. Maslow. As for artistic influences, he references artists such as Franz Kline, Louise Nevelson, Kathe Kollwitz and Edward Weston. He also refers to the installations of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot and Ragnar Kjartansson. He notes that while he was not interested in emulating a specific style or ideology, he found in the above a bold, intricate and emotionally intense aesthetic that compelled him to create. Matt's intent when developing a composition is to establish a harmonious rapport between disparate elements. His belief is that the nature of the creative impulse mimics one of the fundamental tasks of consciousness in general – it strives to resolve a collection of objects that have no overt, rational connection into a coherent gesture. As such, his creative efforts are not dedicated to a fixed ideology or intellectual concern. Rather, in each composition he makes there is an effort to address simple subjective awareness and the ceaseless need therein to bring some degree of resolution or coherence to any given context. Put simply, he finds in a completed composition a sense of certainty or fixity that offsets the discomfort created by the “ambiguity of the personal.” He notes that making art for him is a response to being at the intersection of the limited understanding we have as humans and the sense of an “Absolute” we are capable of having in certain trans-figurative moments. Matt's current project remains committed to the above referenced goal of achieving a gratifying balance between compositional forms and textures. These photo-based digital collages are derived from previous studies he has done in graphite, ink-wash and photography.