Orange Dot Gallery – AmeliasMagazine

Amelia’s Magazine | Exhibition: HIPSTAMATICS at the Orange Dot Gallery, Bloomsbury

Illustration by Emma Block

From student life to Vogue fame in one action packed year, here Daisy Knights’ creations have already been snapped up by our most loved style icons and proved that ethically responsible jewellery can still be achingly cool.

Splitting her time between the simple life in the countryside and the rush of her production process, Daisy tells us a little bit more about the passion and inspiration behind her jewellery collections and what the future holds for this wonderfully British label.

Your collection has taken off at incredible speed, how does that feel?
It’s great, I’m so happy that people want to buy and wear my designs! I saw my bracelets in Vogue this month and had a moment of “wow, this time last year, I was at university and now my jewellery is in Vogue!”

Illustration by Holly Trill

Two of your pieces, the Oxidised Feather ring and the 22 Karat Skull ring have recently been worn by Daisy Lowe and Alexa Chung, two of the UK’s biggest style icons. Did they approach you personally or was it just a wonderful surprise?
Well, we share the same publicist who made them aware of my pieces and happily, they seemed to love them!

Which inspirations lie behind your jewellery designs?
Every collection is named after a friend and I use them as a muse for that collection. I aim to embody that person in the collection, My new one is Talullah, after my friend Tallulah Harlech.

You pride yourself on having an ethically responsible ethos throughout your collection, is this something you have always had a strong belief in?
My workshop is in Britain and even my pouches are made here. I really try to be responsible but it’s not possible yet to get everything transparent sourced, which is what I hope for one day! There are so many grey areas within the industry in regards to where things come from. Keeping things in Britain means I know every person working for me, I know exactly how things are made and every person in my workshop is a highly skilled craftsman/woman. It means that my prices are higher than if I used a factory in India or China but I think the kind of people who buy my jewellery respect that it is very high quality and British made.

Illustration by Matilde Sazio

Each one of your pieces is hand made from recycled materials, which is becoming increasingly popular in a society where everything seems so disposable. Is this something you aim to maintain and something you think your buyers appreciate above anything else?
I don’t want the main aspect of my jewellery to be that it is recycled. For my brand, it’s about the design and the recycled silver is just a plus! Not every piece is recycled silver but the majority is. For example, the chain is not recycled because it’s not possible to obtain. I would love my jewellery to be made from ethically mined silver rather than recycled but right now, not enough is produced and I’m not even sure it is possible yet, so right now recycled is better than nothing. I do hope, however, for it to be ethically mined silver one day in the future. My fine jewellery and bespoke engagement rings are ethically mined gold and diamonds.

You personally make one of your designs, the Studded Wrap Around ring, at your home workshop away from production, is there any particular reason as to why you chose this one to work on alone?
I don’t ever want to be separated from the making process and this is a very popular piece so it’s nice to feel involved. I also make the Michelle stacking rings and a few others. It keeps my skills up for when I make engagement rings and bespoke pieces! I hate being away from the bench and I’m constantly making new samples for collections or adding pieces to existing ones.

Illustration by Cat Palairet

Are there any designers out there that you would compare yourself and your work to?
At this early stage in my career, (I only graduated from Central Saint Martins last year) I’m not sure I could compare myself to anyone yet! However, my favourite designer is Matthew Williamson and I like to think my jewellery matches his clothing quite well!

Which of your pieces are you the most fond of?
My favourite piece has to be the new skull ring that I’ve done in an exclusive collection for Urban Outfitters… it’s not out yet though so you will have to wait and see!

What do you get up to in the spare time that you have away from designing?
I live in the Cotswolds and I love going for country walks with my boyfriend and our dog, Ace Ventura Pet Detective (Ace for short). There’s a great pub in my village called the Falcon Inn which serves amazing locally sourced food and I love sitting by the fire there. I also love to sail and surf and when my boyfriend is back from work (he’s a pilot in the RAF) we go on surf trips together. I also love going to the British Museum and the V&A.

What does the future hold for Daisy Knights?
Well hopefully it holds a long and happy career. But for the immediate future keep your eyes peeled for my new Spring/Summer collection…

Illustration by Emma Block

From student life to Vogue fame in one action packed year, more about Daisy Knights’ creations have already been snapped up by our most loved style icons and proved that ethically responsible jewellery can still be achingly cool.

Splitting her time between the simple life in the countryside and the rush of her production process, approved Daisy tells us a little bit more about the passion and inspiration behind her jewellery collections and what the future holds for this wonderfully British label.

Your collection has taken off at incredible speed, visit this how does that feel?
It’s great, I’m so happy that people want to buy and wear my designs! I saw my bracelets in Vogue this month and had a moment of “wow, this time last year, I was at university and now my jewellery is in Vogue!”

Illustration by Holly Trill

Illustration by Cat Palairet

From student life to Vogue fame in one action packed year, dosage Daisy Knights’ creations have already been snapped up by our most loved style icons and proved that ethically responsible jewellery can still be achingly cool.

Illustration by Holly Trill

Illustration by Matilde Sazio

Illustration by Cat Palairet

Illustration by Gareth A Hopkins

If you’re feeling a bit delicate and would quite like to be wafted by a soft feathery fan type device, no rx as you contemplate, viagra Martha Tilston is for you. With songs entitled; Wild Swimming, Rockpools, Space and Firefly, she is all about sweet country and looking out from under the covers. But with the protection of delicate notes and kindness.

I first discovered Martha Tilston a few years ago and to be honest, I didn’t really want to tell anyone about her. She is my safety blanket and makes me feel at home. Back when she and I met, I had just left University in Cornwall and was at a loss as to what the hell to do next. My boyfriend and I moved to Bristol and temped for a hideous agency. All winter we were stuck working together inputting money off coupons for Tena Lady. Fabulous for any relationship. We’d cycle there, numb ourselves for eight hours, then cycle home. I kept a notebook by my desk and had my i pod streaming Tilston. I wrote loads in those endless, dark hours.

Then our bikes got stolen, we were laid off Tena Lady, our rented flat was put up for sale and I wrote even more. Tilston is good as a background to “Why is the world doing this to me?!” She restores faith. I give you Lucy:

Literally surrounded by art, Martha Tilston must have found it hard not be inspired as she grew up. She was born in the West Country and is the daughter of English folk singer, Steve Tilston. When her parents split, she moved to somewhere just outside London with her artist mother, who remarried a theatre director. As a teenager she would play the piano every night to the family. This led to Tilston writing songs and then picking up the guitar. Throughout she also visited Bristol, where her father and stepmother, Maggie Boyle– also a folk singer – lived. There she would spend time with folk legends like John Renbourn and Bert Jansch. Imagine! How could she not be arty?

Illustration by Karina Yarv

In 2000, she formed a duo, Mouse, with guitarist Nick Marshall. Releasing two albums, they became extremely popular with the more underground loving, festival goers. However, Tilston decided to go solo in 2002, supporting Damien Rice on a tour in Ireland. Then in 2005, she released her first full length album, Blimbling on her own label Squiggly. This album holds Brighton Song, (which is where she was living at the time) a song I adore and makes me think about my years growing up in the hills next to the coastal city. Ah – nostalgia. Bimbling was funded by selling the original canvases she had painted to provide the artwork for the CD.

Martha Bimbling

Bimbling album available on Squiggly Records – Art work by Martha Tilston

Tilston was nominated for Best New Act at the BBC Folk Awards in 2007. She has since become increasingly popular and has opened the Acoustic Stage at Glastonbury. However, she still loves impromptu and small shows. Her love of music outshining any desire for glitz. Her latest album Lucy and The Wolves, (Squiggly Records through Proper) is out now. It features her glorious band; The Woods, comprising of a host of instruments, including the mandolin, cello, violin and double bass. They truly add and compliment the atmospheric, delicate sound. Favourites include the aforementioned; Wild Swimming and Rockppols. The former, a slow, purposeful song full of delicious lust and feeling. The simile of liberating and beautiful night swimming, illustrating the purity of her love. Whilst Rockpools is also dedication to love and nature, it is centered more on her comfort found in the landscapes and nuggets of beauty. Eyes clapping on a tiny piece of peace, that at that second is shining only for you to see.

Martha Lucy and the Wolves

Lucy and The Wolves available on Squiggly Records through Proper. Art work by Martha Tilston

To summarise; Tilston is thought out, dancing on the hills, living in yurts complete with outdoor fires, English folk. If you like artists like Mary Hampton, Alela Diane and gentle Bellowhead, and you don’t know about Martha Tilston already, then you really should listen. If you don’t like folk, listen anyway, as she will make you feel wrapped up and safe on a blustery January day. Like today.

Martha Tilston‘s albums are available on Squiggly Records and she is touring in May, with dates to be released – Watch out for listings on Amelia’s Magazine.

If you’re feeling a bit delicate and would quite like to be wafted by a soft feathery fan type device, look as you contemplate, adiposity Martha Tilston is for you. With songs entitled; Wild Swimming, more about Rockpools, Space and Firefly, she is all about sweet country and looking out from under the covers. But with the protection of delicate notes and kindness.

I first discovered Martha a few years ago and to be honest, I didn’t really want to tell anyone about her. She is my safety blanket and makes me feel at home. Back when she and I met, I had just left University in Cornwall and was at a loss as to what the hell to do next. My boyfriend and I moved to Bristol and temped for a hideous agency. All winter we were stuck working together inputting money off coupons for Tena Lady. Fabulous for any relationship. We’d cycle there, numb ourselves for eight hours, then cycle home. I kept a notebook by my desk and had my i pod streaming Martha. I wrote loads in those endless, dark hours.

Artifcial:

Then our bikes got stolen, we were laid off Tena Lady, our rented flat was put up for sale and I wrote even more. Martha is good as a background to “Why is the world doing this to me?!” She restores faith.

I give you Silver Dagger:

Literally surrounded by art, Martha Tilston must have found it hard not be inspired as she grew up. She was born in the West Country and is the daughter of English folk singer, Steve Tilston. When her parents split, she moved to somewhere just outside London with her artist mother, who remarried a theatre director. As a teenager she would play the piano every night to the family. This led to Martha writing songs and then picking up the guitar. Throughout she also visited Bristol, where her father and stepmother, Maggie Boyle- also a folk singer – lived. There she would spend time with folk legends like John Renbourn and Bert Jansch. Imagine! How could she not be arty?

In 2000, she formed a duo, Mouse, with guitarist Nick Marshall. Releasing two albums, they became extremely popular with the more underground loving, festival goers. However, Martha decided to go solo in 2002, supporting Damian Rice on a tour in Ireland. Then in 2005, she released her first full length album, Blimbling on her own label Squiggly. This album holds Brighton Song, (which is where she was living at the time) a song I adore and makes me think about my years growing up in the hills next to the coastal city. Ah – nostalgia. Bimbling was funded by selling the original canvases she had painted to provide the artwork for the CD.

Martha was nominated for Best New Act at the BBC Folk Awards in 2007. She has since become increasingly popular and has opened the Acoustic Stage at Glastonbury. However, she still loves impromptu and small shows. Her love of music outshining any desire for glitz.

Her latest album Lucy and the Wolves, (Squiggly Records through Proper) is out now. It features her glorious band; The Woods, comprising of a host of instruments, including the mandolin, cello, violin and double bass. They truly add and compliment the atmospheric, delicate sound. Favourites include the aforementioned; Wild Swimming and Rockppols. The former, a slow, purposeful song full of delicious lust and feeling. The simile of liberating and beautiful night swimming, illustrating the purity of her love. Whilst Rockpools is also dedication to love and nature, it is centered more on her comfort found in the landscapes and nuggets of beauty. Eyes clapping on a tiny piece of peace, that at that second is shining only for you to see.

To summarise; Martha is thought out, dancing on the hills, living in yurts complete with outdoor fires, English folk. If you like artists like Mary Hampton, Alela Diane and gentle Bellowhead, and you don’t know about Martha Tilston already, then you really should listen. If you don’t like folk, listen anyway, as she will make you feel wrapped up and safe on a blustery January day. Like today.

She is touring in May

If you’re feeling a bit delicate and would quite like to be wafted by a soft feathery fan type device, more about as you contemplate, look Martha Tilston is for you. With songs entitled; Wild Swimming, Rockpools, Space and Firefly, she is all about sweet country and looking out from under the covers. But with the protection of delicate notes and kindness.

Artifcial:

I give you Silver Dagger:

Literally surrounded by art, Martha Tilston must have found it hard not be inspired as she grew up. She was born in the West Country and is the daughter of English folk singer, Steve Tilston. When her parents split, she moved to somewhere just outside London with her artist mother, who remarried a theatre director. As a teenager she would play the piano every night to the family. This led to Martha writing songs and then picking up the guitar. Throughout she also visited Bristol, where her father and stepmother, Maggie Boyle- also a folk singer – lived. There she would spend time with folk legends like John Renbourn and Bert Jansch. Imagine! How could she not be arty?

She is touring in May

All Hipstamatic photography by Matt Bramford

For anybody that’s been under a rock for the past year, medicine Hipstamatic is an iPhone app(lication) that converts your terrible phone camera into an analogue wonder (sort of). For the past year, no rx it has transformed the way we use phone cameras. Once a means of taking quick snaps of your mates having a pint, mind the Hipstamatic app has allowed everybody from Joe Public to professional photographers to capture beautiful images with speed and ease. Hipstamatic pictures now appear everywhere – on the front page of the New York Times, in fashion stories in magazines and on countless websites.

It was only a matter of time, then, that somebody would present an exhibition of Hipstamatic pictures (Jeez that H word is hard to type). The ‘Hipstamatics’ blog allows users from all over the world to submit their photographs and 157 of those submitted have been selected for this unique exhibition. 157, coincidentally, is the number of Hipstamatic 100 analogue cameras that were first produced by Bruce and Winston Dorbowski in the 1980s.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Hipstamatic. It’s transformed the way I take photographs. I would never use the standard camera on the iPhone for photographs to use in posts here, but Hipstamatic allows myself and other contributors to take aesthetically pleasing photographs that perfectly capture whatever it is we’re talking about. There’s also Autostitch, but that’s another story/blog/exhibition…

So what to say of the exhibition? It’s certainly presented brilliantly. Small prints of 6″x6″ cover the walls of the intimate gallery, held up pegged to string. There’s a huge variety of photographs, including obligatory cat portraits, cityscapes, beach scenes, cups of tea, fashion portraits and everything in between. All 157, presented side by side, taken by 157 different people in 157 different places, look fantastic. The problem I have (and I’m aware that I’m bitter for not submitting any of my own) is that everybody can take a great picture with Hipstamatic. That’s the beauty of it. Of course, there’s a certain amount of skill involved and there are some great pictures here that I assume are by professional photographers, or at least people with a damn good eye. Cropping, lighting and subject have all been considered. They’re all brilliant. But I could have done that! Anybody could have!

The best way for me to judge the exhibition is get over myself and ignore the fact that I could have been one of the featured artists. Instead, I’m genuinely pleased that somebody decided to do it. It cements the phenomenon that Hipstamatic has generated. I also think it’s a bit of a social experiment as well as an exhibition. It’s a modern day Duchamp’s Readymades; it questions who and what we should put in a gallery. This is ordinary people using a revolutionary app to create stunning photographs that don’t look out of place at the side of some of the world’s greatest photographers. Of course, I’m sure the exhibition hasn’t launched to be taken so seriously. It’s wonderful to see so many images of a similar nature, from all over the world, side by side.

You do have to wonder though. Can you imagine going to a gallery to see a collection of phone camera pictures? I mean, I’m sure if Hirst or Emin or some other famous wally at the Saatchi Gallery did it we’d all flock to it, but can you really imagine what that might be like? Without the vintage quality of the app – its ghostly vignetting, chromatic aberration, muted colours and film-like texture, the majority of these would just be ordinary personal photographs.

It’s retinal art. There are no hidden meanings or artist’s thought processes, they’re a selection of beautiful pictures and it’s interesting to see how people have used the app in a number of different ways. You can also see, clearly, that each photograph has been considered much more than your typical holiday snap. Many are posed (including the reclining cat – one of my favourites) while others make use of unusual light or extraordinary objects.

The problem I have with Hipstamatic, which becomes clear from the exhibition when you print the images, is that the resolution isn’t wonderful. Some of them had obviously been shot on the lower setting (there are two, and the high-res images aren’t great either) and some images are a little pixelated when you get close up. As a collection, though, this isn’t such a problem – but in a way it reminds us that these are ephemeral photographs and, really, they wouldn’t stand up at the side of traditional film images.

In terms of artist integrity, the exhibition isn’t going to win any awards. But as a Hipstamatic fan, thank God the Hipstamatics have cemented, in this small but effective way, the power and phenomenon of Apple’s App of the Year 2010 in this mesmerising and thought-provoking exhibition. Long may it reign!

Written by Matt Bramford on Friday January 14th, 2011 6:13 pm

Categories ,Bloomsbury, ,Camera, ,Hipstamatic, ,iPhone, ,Orange Dot Gallery, ,Photographs, ,Tavistock Place, ,vintage

Amelia’s Magazine | Exhibition: HIPSTAMATICS at the Orange Dot Gallery, Bloomsbury

All Hipstamatic photography by Matt Bramford

For anybody that’s been under a rock for the past year, Hipstamatic is an iPhone app(lication) that converts your terrible phone camera into an analogue wonder (sort of). For the past year, it has transformed the way we use phone cameras. Once a means of taking quick snaps of your mates having a pint, the Hipstamatic app has allowed everybody from Joe Public to professional photographers to capture beautiful images with speed and ease. Hipstamatic pictures now appear everywhere – on the front page of the New York Times, in fashion stories in magazines and on countless websites.

Written by Matt Bramford on Friday January 14th, 2011 6:13 pm

Categories ,Bloomsbury, ,Camera, ,Hipstamatic, ,iPhone, ,Orange Dot Gallery, ,Photographs, ,Tavistock Place, ,vintage

Amelia’s Magazine | An interview with American artist Matthew Rose

My situation (image courtesy of Matthew Rose)

Matthew Rose is an American artist living in Paris known for his 1, look 000 piece wall-to-wall collages. On viewing his work, purchase you can’t help but feel as if you are peering into the wrong end of a telescope; the objects look familiar yet distorted, eerie yet beautiful.

His abstract, artistic style presents a surreal and parallel world infused with vibrant colours where he often plays with an unusual fusion of subjects (and by this I mean a man with carrots for his head or a woman who is part-human, part-camera – pretty crazy stuff but in the most fantastic sense!).

For almost three decades, Matthew has been producing installations, which reinforce the connection between imagery and literature in art. His works – many of which are a composite of beautiful colours, visuals and text melting into one another – evoke the genres of 20th century surrealist artists, and several critics have cited his work as demonstrating a ‘dadaist exploration of sense and non-sense’.

Matthew’s installations have featured in galleries and museums across Europe, Asia and the United States, and his work has appeared in numerous books and magazines, including MASTERS: COLLAGE (Sterling Publishing/Lark Books, 2010) published recently.

His most notable art project to date, A Book About Death, showcased in New York’s Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery in September 2009. The show was a logistical feat involving thousands of artists from across the globe sending 500 artworks in the form of postcards to construct the exhibition. The beauty of the exhibition was that the end result was offered to one lucky visitor in the form of a book… for free. More than 18 exhibitions of A Book About Death have been staged worldwide, including The Queens Museum in New York, MuBE in São Paulo and MoMA Wales.

Private view invite (image courtesy of Matthew Rose and Orange Dot Gallery)

Matthew’s most recent project, Scared But Fresh, is a dislocated love story exploring the sense and non-sense, which I was lucky enough to catch at Orange Dot Gallery, a lovely new exhibition space in the heart of Bloomsbury. By his own admission, Matthew is interested in ‘creating works to see them for himself’ but as a by-product of his imagination, his mesmerising creations prompt the viewer to garner thoughts of their own.

After gate-crashing a Brown University reunion held at the gallery, where Matthew studied Semiotics in 1981, I managed to grab a quiet moment with the calm and composed artist before his alumni chums arrived, gaining a glimpse into the annals of the mind of a truly fascinating individual…

How old were you when you realised you wanted to be an artist?
I couldn’t have been more than six years old when my mother and aunt dragged me to The Brooklyn Museum to see Van Gogh. The lines went around the block and I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about; I was hungry, my feet hurt and being small, I was suffocating in this cloud of wool coats. Once inside the galleries, however, I caught my first glimpse of what has proven to be a very nourishing world… I stayed close to my mother and aunt for about 10 minutes but soon enough got lost (purposely) and quietly pushed my way through the crowds to get up close to Van Gogh’s brilliant colors, these vibrating landscapes – in particular, the painting he produced in the Arlesian sun, Almond Branches in Bloom (1890). It turned out to be one of the pieces he produced the year he died of a self-inflicted gun shot wound. I never forgot the color and intelligence behind this painting, and I slowly began to look for this “art experience” in my own.

Anglais (image courtesy of Matthew Rose)

What artists did you look up to when you were developing your artistic style?
Most artists I know were influenced by the early 20th century modernists – Picasso, Matisse, Malevich…then Duchamp and the Dadaists, the Surrealists, Pollock, de Kooning and then those who flavored the world we arrived in: Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg. For me, probably folks like Hopper for his era and compositions and silence; and Cornell for his expansive internal universe, and mostly Ray Johnson, because he was a friend and teacher (as he was to thousands) and the way he worked. Since I mostly work in collage, I’m more prone to think in disparate images and texts, an old-fashioned multi-media stream of consciousness. I don’t have problems with dislocated images and lexical puzzles. Of course I don’t pretend that these artists are producing works of philosophy, but rather reflecting the cataclysm that stems from consciousness.

Your work often involves the use of collage – what led to this fascination and why do you like working in this particular abstract context?
Collage is just one of several mediums I work in. Over the years I’ve produced works/object in wax or wood, painting and drawing, and text pieces either as rubber stamp works (printing) or drawing the words. One of my interests is word as image, and collage permits me to combine words and images in a fairly rapid fashion. I tend to work super fast and produce series in a matter of days or weeks. I’m pretty obsessed once I get going and very little interferes with my process. I did a show some years ago called ‘Spelling With Scissors’, and this is my approach – combining literature (texts) with images. I have always discussed my aesthetic view as a form of reading.

What does working in collage allow you to express in ways that other forms of artistic expression cannot?
Speed. Strangeness. The wide array of material allows me to cover many ideas and compositional concepts in a short period of time. Painting plays a part in what I do, as does drawing and often these mediums come into play in a work. But collage is an approach to consciousness, and that, I think is the flux endpoint in my work. Most of the elements I use are found, and that, too, is an important part of my process. Seeing what the world washes up at my feet, the skidmarks of my time and place.

Scared But Fresh at Orange Dot Gallery (photography courtesy of Orange Dot Gallery)

What was the inspiration behind Scared But Fresh?
Scared But Fresh is a love story. The works in the exhibition come together (in my mind, at least) to lay out a dislocated love story, a song about love with its insistent cacophony. I think if you look at the pieces in this exhibition, including the 12-piece collage on paper series, America, you’ll see sex, love and death (the staples of art making), you’ll discover heartache, lust, dread and all those angst-laden things that produce so much of the content of our lives. Or at least that’s the way I see it. Again, I produce these works to see them myself, to see what these odd elements produce in combination, and to perhaps understand what sort of stuff is moving around inside of me; that said, it’s not therapy, but rather an inquiry.

Why is the exhibition called Scared But Fresh?
Scared But Fresh was a phrase sent to me in 2002 by a friend; she signed an e mail that way. I immediately seized upon it, made a tonne of text works with it, cutting stencils and painting them, or adding it to other works, but also meditating upon its possible meanings. The “but” is critical. My thinking in using it for the title of this exhibition at Orange Dot Gallery in London was that it was so aggressive, sure but still loaded with innocence and dread. Like love.

Critics have previously cited your work as a dadaist exploration of sense and non-sense. What would your response be to this?
I would agree with them. Dada is many things, and has been the point of departure for nearly 100 years of art production. The combination of sense and non-sense, broken grammar, chopped up meaning, and the flux of everyday life is, in my view, what my consciousness is like. What is the sense of finding a dollar bill stuck in a pile of dog shit? Or posters torn and weathered revealing a history of pasting and perhaps, a history of beauty (the models featured in years of posters, bits of their faces and clothing revealed)? I grab onto these things and consider them. Other people think about interest rates and widget production, and so do I, but I do something quite different with the information, the images and the meaning of these things. A large piece I produced, Les Affaires (prints are on Keep Calm Gallery’s site), surveys all sorts of exchanges; it is about commerce in many ways. Another work, Immaculate Perception (also available as a print on Keep Calm Gallery), is a very simple surreal piece showing a girl blossoming from a lemon tree. It’s not very interesting to be logical all day long, plus logic is overrated.

Cornell Bottle (photography courtesy of Orange Dot Gallery)

How would you describe your own style of work?
I’m a cut and paste artist. But I try to be clear in my chaos. The style can be dada, neo-pop, surreal, but I think after all these years, it’s simply mine.

When you create art, do you do it in the frame of mind that it will be viewed by others or it is created as a visual form of a personal diary?
I create these things to see them for myself, to discover what this 1/2 face would look like with this 1/2 refrigerator. Or what would happen if this nice girl in her party dress would be like if she were wearing a steak for a head, or a pair of mechanical gears for breasts? I produce these works the way I play chess, carefully, but totally willing to take risks, totally willing to exchange queens, sacrifice pawns…not afraid to lose. As for a diary, I’m not sure about that, but I do work in books very often. Some of my series come in the form of 110-page visual novels like A Perfect Friend and Days Like These, People (drawings), Machines (drawings) and a dozen others. I feel not so much as if I’m making things for other people – again – but more for myself, and not to cure myself of anything other than the nightmare that is our world.

You are now based in France. Do you find that where you live has any influence on the themes that run through your work?
Living in France probably hasn’t altered in any significant way the themes that run through my work. Love, sex, death, anxiety, money will find you out no matter where you live. The material though is different. As I’m extremely interested in language, the plethora of printed materials in French, German, Spanish, Italian, English and other languages abounds here. I often find old beat up books tossed out on the street, or objects on the sidewalk. I can also play with a tonne of languages and I very much enjoy that. It’s the world. My studio is small and quiet and as I also live in the space I’m always up at 3 am working. Or I sleep then wake and work… something is always going on here, and should I need to go out, a walk proves a real fascination for me after a period of intense activity. “Holy smokes,” I’ll say to myself. “I live in France.” I sometimes forget that I actually live in this country.

What thoughts/feelings would you like viewers to go away with after they have been to your exhibition?
Well they tell me that they enjoy the work, they like that craziness of the work, but that it all makes sense. During the exhibition the head of a large international advertising company spent quite a while looking at my work. His focus is message communication, and in particularly creating iPhone apps, so he’s very attuned to visuals and text, and he said to me: “This is brilliant.” At the moment he was looking at a work from the America series of a girl on a swing with the word “HOME” pasted on top of her. She was pasted, in turn, on top of a photograph of a ship in a raging storm. That to me was very rewarding. Because something that was interesting to me was interesting to someone else, it was strong enough to click somewhere else.

How would you best like to be remembered?
You mean when I die? I launched an enormous project about this (in a way), A Book About Death. So I’ve thought long and hard about what its like to not have consciousness, to be left alone, to struggle with the impermanence of life, and the often sad and painful lives we lead when the folks we love are no longer with us. I’ve tried not to turn away from death and acknowledge it. Maybe as someone who wasn’t afraid to confront his demons, loved his friends and collaborated with the world in a way that made a little bit more sense out of the nonsense.

Written by Kat Phan on Thursday November 4th, 2010 2:13 am

Categories ,A Book About Death, ,Brown University, ,Cornell, ,Dadaists, ,de Kooning, ,Duchamp, ,Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery, ,Hopper, ,Johns, ,Kat Phan, ,Keep Calm Gallery, ,Malevich, ,matisse, ,Matthew Rose, ,MoMA Wales, ,MuBE, ,Orange Dot Gallery, ,picasso, ,Pollock, ,Rauschenberg, ,Ray Johnson, ,Scared But Fresh, ,Surrealists, ,The Brooklyn Museum, ,The Queens Museum, ,van gogh, ,Warhol

Amelia’s Magazine | An interview with American artist Matthew Rose

My situation (image courtesy of Matthew Rose)

Private view invite (image courtesy of Matthew Rose and Orange Dot Gallery)

Anglais (image courtesy of Matthew Rose)

Scared But Fresh at Orange Dot Gallery (photography courtesy of Orange Dot Gallery)

Cornell Bottle (photography courtesy of Orange Dot Gallery)

Written by Kat Phan on Thursday November 4th, 2010 2:13 am

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