Matt King
Matt King’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at The University of Georgia, Werkstätte Gallery, Massimo Audiello, MassArt, Reynolds Gallery and Fourteen30 Contemporary as well as group exhibitions at venues including Jane Lombard, Luhring Augustine, and the Vienna Kunsthalle. King received his MFA from Bard College and is a graduate of Cooper Union and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Honors include a VMFA Visual Arts Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and visiting artist residencies at the Mountain Lake Biological Station; Fiskars Village, Finland; NCCA St. Petersburg, Russia; and at the American Academy in Rome. He has taught at institutions such as MassArt, Cooper Union, RISD, and VCU, where he served as Chair of the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media.
My research is driven by an appreciation for life’s contradictions and paradoxes, everyday absurdities that keep me unsettled and curious. My studio practice draws from sculpture, photography, printmaking and digital media, often resulting in hybrid forms specific to each project. As a hands-on maker, I relish the potential of transforming the familiar into the productively strange, motivated by the belief that art has the unique ability to urge casual looking into rapt, critical attention.
My current work explores connections between human ambition and appetite, unchecked growth and ruin, hunger and sustainability. These are sculptures in the form of architectural fragments and fragile lattices that support food crops such as wheat, corn, and beans. The work develops slowly, transforming over the course of a growing season, engaging with multiple timescales and external forces. I seek to make visible what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “more-than-human entanglements,” where agricultural and anthropological artifacts become as unruly as the world we inhabit.