Inside the White Cube

Matthew Booth

1 May – 7 July 2013

Dates

1 May – 7 July 2013

Location

White Cube Bermondsey

144 – 152 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3TQ

Matthew Booth’s photographs seem to work against an overarching feeling that a subtle detail has been brutally altered in the picture. He is interested in complicating the threshold between straight and staged photography, expanding the ways by which a photograph might originate. Fuelled by an interest in repetition and the polishing of experience through picture-making, Booth often photographs—or recreates—an everyday scene, but transforms it subtly so that it comes across as at once an immediately recognisable image and a peculiar paradox.

In works such as Joe Graham-Felsen (2010), for example, he has subtly altered a photograph of beer cans on a glass table. Photographing through a polarizing filter and then erasing the edges of the table’s transparent surface in post-production, the artist leaves the objects to float, oddly suspended. With this simple act of omission—reminiscent of early surrealist photography, but performed using current-day editing programmes—he de-familiarises an otherwise commonplace scene.

Booth’s images often appear staged, even when they faithfully document the world as it is. In Emergency lighting, Manhattan Municipal Building, October 30, 2012 (2012), he photographed municipal buildings in New York City during the black-out caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Using long exposure times, he allowed light from a back-up generator and passing construction vehicles to soak the image in an eerie glow reminiscent of stage lighting.

Phil M. Leonard, Century City, 1988 (2010) creates further tensions between the fabricated and the real. Recreating a scene from a 1980s action film, Booth eschews the film’s storyline to focus on a seemingly everyday image of a table, designed by the film’s set decorator (the eponymous Phil M. Leonard). Rather than working with an image from the film itself, he has remade the scene in his studio. In doing so he produces an odd contradiction: the reproduction of an ‘original’, which has only ever existed in the wholly constructed hyper-reality of film.

Underlying much of this artist’s practice is an interest in reflexively addressing the medium of photography. Certain works make direct reference to photographic history, while others, such as Studio surfaces (2011) and Splash study (2013), reveal the spaces, objects and processes associated with the practice. Showing broken tubes lying in snow beside a mysterious green light, Fluorescent Tubes, New Haven, CT (2011) subtly alludes to light as the basic condition underlying all photographic representation.

With thanks to Andrej Blom, Gregory Keech and Martin Ciastko.

Matthew Booth was born in 1982 in Toronto, Canada. He lives and works in New York, USA. He completed a MFA in photography at Yale University and a BFA in photography at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. He has participated in group exhibitions such as ‘…but the clouds…’, Room East, New York (2013); ‘On Walls’, FAB Gallery, Richmond (2012) and ‘Between You and the Thing Itself’, Or Gallery, Vancouver (2007). He is co-founder of Top Top Studio in Brooklyn, New York, co-founder and co-editor of Picture Magazine, Brooklyn, New York and co-founder and co-editor of Pyramid Power magazine, Vancouver.

Installation Views

Matthew Booth Inside the White Cube North Gallery II White C Ube Bermondsey London 1 May 7 July 2013 medium res

Matthew Booth Inside the White Cube North Gallery II White C Ube Bermondsey London 1 May 7 July 2013 medium res 1

Matthew Booth Inside the White Cube North Gallery II White C Ube Bermondsey London 1 May 7 July 2013 medium res 2

Inside the White Cube

‘Inside the White Cube’ is a series of exhibitions showcasing work by non-represented artists at the forefront of global developments in contemporary art who have not previously exhibited with the gallery.

Launched in 2011 at White Cube Bermondsey in London, the programme has since expanded to the gallery’s other locations.

Create an Account

To view available artworks and access prices.

Create account