Matthew Luther is a multi-media and video artist based in Riverside California. His work explores the human relationship to nature and the connection of visual imagery to memory, the subconscious and its effect. Luther was a recent Visiting Professor of Art and Design at Hubei University of Technology in Wuhan China. He has exhibited internationally including recent shows in China, Italy, and South Korea. Luther has been a visiting Artist-in-Residence in Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.

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.