Born 1975, in Tacoma, WA, lives and works in Cambridge, MA and Berlin, Germany
Received his MFA From Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT and his BA from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Harris Leiberman Gallery, New York, NY
Matt Saunders’ enigmatic work coaxes viewers to search their memory banks for figures and places seemingly both familiar and forgotten. Saunders is a connoisseur of films, especially those with a camp/cult aesthetic. Out of this interest, he weaves still and moving images together of little known actors or characters into installations of photographs and animations that trigger cultural memory. Abandoned figures of celluloid history are resuscitated in large-format photographic prints—contact prints from ‘negatives’ made with oil on linen, as well as enlargements from small ink on mylar drawings—in painstakingly hand-drawn animations in the rotoscope tradition.
In his photographs as well as his animations, the final image is the result of original paintings on mylar or linen through which light is passed in order to fix an image. In this way Saunders expands upon his training as a painter to bridge the painted, photographed, and moving image and asserts himself as a master of material hybridity. He creates scrims for light to pass through, which is such a lovely quote from the cinematic sources he favors.
