Matthew Luther is a multimedia artist working in Riverside California. His studio work ranges from printmaking to video and draws inspiration from landscapes. His artwork often explores the human relationship to nature and the connection of visual imagery to memory.
After living in China as Visiting Professor of Art and Design at Hubei University of Technology, Luther moved to California with his wife, Robin, where they keep a home and studio.
Along with international exhibitions in China, Italy, and South Korea, Luther has been a visiting Artist-in-Residence in Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
Artist Location: Riverside, CA
Social Media:
PARTICIPATION
Soundscapes [audio tracks] On-site and online June 4th
Hum
The sounds of hums, chants, and gospel in the streets. This audio is the combined sounds of travel into a short condensed rhythm, meant to remove you from the present.
Dystopic Elmo
6 Feet
The flow of Water
Proposed work as accepted for soundpedro 2020:
Earmaginations Silent video The flow of Water
My video work is a reflective and cathartic version of my two-dimensional artwork which is a playful approach to illusion and surface. I use photographs in combination with paint and printmaking techniques to construct paintings that investigate concepts of abstraction, human ideology, and digital consciousness in connection with nature. With video I am able to isolate ideas and moments that capture me. I can take those moments and alter the timeline or piece them together like a collage to reflect a new memory. These memories become visually immersive and new imagined environments.
Earmaginations [silent videos]
Life of Water
Statement:
I am interested in the theoretically ideas of dark ecology and the moment of a post-nature ecological idealism we have entered. The core of my work is photographic and time-based. In my practice photographs are used in combination with paint and printmaking techniques to build the base of digital artworks that investigate concepts of abstraction, human ideology, and digital consciousness in connection with nature. This can be seen in current studio work as a dialogue between abstraction in painting and the digital interface of photography. As a painter I use abstraction as a language similar to how I view my interaction with computer software, as a tool. I take a similar approach when discussing the paradigms and critiques of abstraction, representation, and aura in painting and photography. I find myself constructing a dialogue through the element of digital trompe l’oeil. Scanning paintings at a high resolution, reframing, printing them using photographic and printmaking processes then painting, gold leafing or screen printing on top of the printed surface. I am interested in opening up that conversation beyond the movement of pigment on canvas to the notions of compressed space, illusion, and the phenomenological qualities that occur in the process. Focal depth is altered, details are hyper-realized, and colors become something more than milled pigment as they are reproduced in CMYK and the content that builds the abstraction becomes paramount.