Matt Jones artist talk at studio e gallery, Seattle Wa, June 2024

“The works in In Advance of a Visit energize the mythical (medieval illumination, dream visions, folklore) through attention to the local (old-growth forests, landscape architecture, and communal gardens in Northern Manhattan). An eye hovers in the background, as the poet’s face becomes a landscape, and bats become butterflies, butterfly wings, eyes, windows, the pages of a book. Long since extinguished candles nest under heavy clouds in a Prussian blue sky, the idea of their light lingering, where a broken wrought-iron fence wilts like a flower at the edge of the canvas. The candles are less domestic objects than arboreal entities. The tree stumps are antediluvian beings, their rings expressions of an entire life pulsing against the edge of the pictorial frame. The tree stumps, rooted in thought-feelings of climate catastrophe, erode the art historical assumption of the human subject (and the borders and binaries engendered by it), tendering the possibility of multiple simultaneous perspectives. Recurring symbols are correlated into a dynamic narrative experience. The paintings invite the viewer into each pictorial moment through perspectival instability, narrative ambiguity, and the urgency of the paint handling. There is the promise of story, and yet, the story is not predetermined, it is contingent and alive to the viewer’s presence.” --Matt Jones

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Please make more long videos worth watching or listening to like this ^_^