Andy Mattern is an Assistant Professor of Photography & Digital Media at Oklahoma State University and he is represented by Elizabeth Houston Gallery in New York. His work has been exhibited at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, Photo Center NW in Seattle, the Lawndale Art Center in Houston, Candela Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and the Photographic Centre Peri in Turku, Finland. Mattern has received awards for his work including the Art 365 Grant from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition and the Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. He holds an MFA in Photography from the University of Minnesota and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico.
Average Subject / Medium Distance
Turning the camera on its own logic, these photographs reconfigure paper guides once used to determine exposure and other image settings. Stripped of example imagery, technical numbers, and explanatory text, these relics from midcentury photographic practice are reduced to their underlying structure. In the process of removing this information, digital traces are created, shifting the surface into a rupture between physical and virtual, analog and digital, functional and useless.
To view more of Andy’s work please visit his website.