NATURES MORTES

MATT KILLEN

FROM FEBRUARY 3RD TO FEBRUARY 28TH
OPENING FEBRUARY 5TH, 2010 FROM 7-10PM

Exploring urban decay through digital manipulation of photographs and painting, Killen offers a reflection of our external environment of detritus and waste through a hyper saturated lens. With his palattes gleaned from sources within contemporary culture, Killen animates and abstracts the beauty he finds in the arrested moments of our cities growth, producing images which reflect and integrate into the visual language of our current experience. The result is an attempt to resolve a composition featuring an image of one collection of objects overlaid on a second, unrelated image of a more atmospheric nature. In the end, the objective was to simplify certain aspects of the composition, in terms of style, palette, and subject matter, in order to develop more complex relationships within the painting as a whole. These paintings feature a dynamic use of space, involving an ambiguous relationship between the objects depicted and the atmospheric colourfield in the background; additional complexity in the composition is created by the use of graphic design layout grids, normally used to determine where content is to be placed, but instead used here as a compositional element. Natures Mortes marks Killen’s second solo exhibition with LE Gallery.

Matt Killen is an artist and musician. He received a BFA in art education from Concordia University and an MFA in visual arts from l’Université du Québec à Montréal. He is a founding member of the Centre de recherche urbaine de Montréal, a Montreal-based artist collective and publisher. In his visual art practice, he works principally in painting and sound installation. His work has been presented in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Pittsburgh.