Opening Reception: Thursday, May 26, 6 - 8PM
Artist Talk: Saturday, June 4 at 2 PM
Nicholas Metivier Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Matthew Schofield. The exhibition will open on May 26th and run until June 18th with an opening reception on Thursday, May 26th. This is Schofield’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
In his paintings, Matthew Schofield embraces the experimentation of the amateur photographer as well as the photograph as a tactile object. Typically rendered in a 1:1 scale, his work meticulously reproduces every aspect of the photographs, including characteristic markings such as writing, fading and tears. Schofield’s process - appropriating the images, rendering them in oil paint and reconfiguring them into a new narrative –pays homage to the printed family snapshot that is rapidly becoming obsolete while eschewing sentimentality with his systematic approach.
Schofield’s most recent body of work was derived from a single archive of photographs, gifted to him by someone unrelated and unknown. This unusual act sparked Schofield’s curiosity and presented an opportunity to tell a story out of the images left behind. The archive consisted of 39 unique photographs, mostly black and white with some colour Polaroids. Schofield rendered each photograph in oil paint, true to scale, and captured the nuances and tonal variations in vintage photographs with hand-mixed blacks. In reproducing this archive, Schofield elevates the snapshot medium and makes public what was originally intended for an intimate audience.
The act of painting alters the imagery from its simple record of reality by omission of details, altering the focus of the image and the mood or gesture of the characters. The likeness to the original photograph depends on the way something is considered, weighed and extracted. These alterations hint at the nature of selective memory where the snapshot itself has no real significance other than the psychological connection the photographer has with the image as a symbol of past experience.
– Matthew Schofield
Matthew Schofield has exhibited in Canada and internationally since 1996. His work has been shown in museums and commercial galleries in Canada, France and the United States. In 2014, Schofield was featured in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Painting Hamilton.
