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Asking Versus Telling

The School of Architecture and Art at Norwich University is proud to announce that it will host Matt Burnett’s exhibit, entitled Asking Versus Telling: A Contemporary Inquiry into Landscape and Nature. In addition to the exhibit, Mr. Burnett will give a lecture concerning his work and will be conducting a workshop with students from the School of Architecture and Art. The lecture will begin at noon on Friday, October 14, and results from the workshop will be discussed that afternoon at 4pm.

From Matt Burnett's website:

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As a native of the Adirondack Mountain region, my career as an artist has been molded by an unusually rural upbringing and access to the natural resources of upstate New York. Throughout my life I have been drawn towards the exploration of primordial environments. Through continual inquiry and engagement with wilderness—as site, as concept, and above all as experience—I have adopted painting as a means through which to engage the non-sentient, as a device for seeking the objective access of structure and growth beyond human influences. More recently, I have broadened my exploration of the non-sentient by creating and exploring the circumstances through which nature can create paintings independently of human intention. I construct devices that enable nature to create drawings, paintings, and sculptures autonomously through “natural forces” (wind, tide, etc.).

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My new work embodies a non-objective approach that employs and expands the language of painting though video, sculpture, performance and site-specific work. The challenges of this “new” realism raise fundamental questions of causality and experience, both within the context of art and within perception itself. The dissonant methodologies and convoluted premises underlying the “intention of non-intentionality” both evaporate and expand ideas of the non-human; through a disruption of “cumulative” knowledge, my work redirects perception through the agency of the world.

This paradoxical pursuit is embodied in the auspicious aspirations and practices of Mattaphysics. 

A graduate of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, I recently completed my graduate study at Maine College of Art. I am currently an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Canton where I am teaching drawing, art history and new media studies. My home studio is located in Saranac Lake, New York, in close proximity to the high peaks region of the central Adirondacks. My recent practice combines academic inquiry with fieldwork and site-specific practices, much of it is accomplished on location in the Adirondack State Forest land, and will be periodically documented on the Mattaphysics blogspace. In addition to gallery exhibitions, I am becoming more involved with new media, installation and site-specific events. My extensive exhibition record includes solo shows in New York and Maine; my work is included in collections across the country and internationally.