In the weeks leading up to the opening of the group show What is the Where? on November 13, we are profiling the 15 artists to learn more about them and their work.

Matthew Woodward
Chicago, Illinois

Tenth Street, graphite on paper, 2009, 78 x 60

Matthew Woodward is a Chicago-based artist, displaced from New York, where he was born and upstate-raised. He is currently represented by Linda Warren Gallery. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005 and the New York Academy of Art in 2007.  His work is about the overlapping identities of the American City, as understood through the rusting and broken ornament of a ubiquitous architectural heritage.

Q: How are you using your art to interpret the show’s theme of location impacting perception?
A: I think what’s interesting about the way we understand a place, a place somewhere, is that our understanding of it depends largely upon not only what we find in it, but exactly what we’re interested in finding in it. Our perceptions, as it were, are determined by a kind of contextual relationship we have with the information that we happen to recognize, with the things we’ve experienced or haven’t experienced, and the long arch of associations that these things, in turn, are indelibly exchanging with us.

That being said, among other things, my work is about architecture, or an ambivalence towards architecture, and the way architecture can act like a powerful old memory influencing our perceptions of a given place and time. It tries to look directly in on this influence, as if it were an intersection, and replicate it. And by way of looking at something, by way of perceiving it in the place we find it in, we also happen to, of course, interpret it and in that interpretation we are afforded both an attitude towards history and the inheritance of a heaping mound of cultural allusion, of association that comes along with that attitude.

Furthermore, my work is about the inevitable displacement that occurs at this intersection, at this impasse where an object and the context that colored it immediately comes up against the setting that has since reappropriated it. That the things in my work are removed from a specific location to some other is important because that removal constitutes an occasion. And in the occasion of removing it from where it came from to where it is now you have a meaning separated, or, again, displaced, by a particular apprehension of history.

Q: Does where you work on your art (studio, apartment, school, etc.) influence it?
A: I think it does, certainly. I think the creative research that goes on in the studio is the apotheosis of art making. However, that research, for better or worse, is done alone. It happens in solitude. And experiencing that exult of art making can be impossibly isolating. That sense of isolation is clearly in my work and it only makes sense that it would be complicit with something almost totally forgotten, yet remains attached in some way to the place where it was initially encountered.

And while so much work is done outside the studio–for me, for instance, I have to go walking in a city–eventually there is always the going back and working in a small white room alone. Exulting or not, there’s nothing romantic about it. So, in this case the work is influenced directly by being alone for hours, by being alone walking for hours in a room.

Visit Matthew Woodward’s Website

What is the Where? will show November 13 to November 21 at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.