Bob's Oil Co. Photograph

Matthew Brooks is a Montreal-based artist originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba. He holds a B.F.A. in Photography and an M.F.A. in Studio Arts from Concordia University. He was named the 2017 recipient of the Lande Award in Photography and the 2018 recipient of the Roloff Beny Foundation Fellowship in Photography. In 2019 and 2020 he was longlisted for the Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award. Aging architecture and material culture are frequent themes in his large-scale photographic work which explores ambiguous narratives and the veracity of the image. Within his hyperreal tableaus, the viewer’s sense of the real is destabilized, creating an uncanny sense of both reality and fiction. The construction of the photographic image is constantly at play in his works as he creates cinematic, anachronistic scenes which combine mundanity and artifice. His work has been recently included in solo and group exhibitions at Birch Contemporary, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Occurrence, Centre Skol, Galerie B-312, and Galerie POPOP among others. In April 2017, he presented a new large-scale public artwork in New Westminster, BC for the Capture Photography Festival. His work has been published in print and online in publications such as Magenta Magazine, Lenscratch, It's Nice That, Huffington Post, FotoRoom, and Ain't Bad Magazine among others. His work is included in the Capital One collection, Colart Collection, and private collections.