Our lives take place on many levels. We walk and talk in the physical world, but there is an important portion of our lives in the virtual realm. It may be social media, digital photos or thoughts stored via computer files. Artist C. Matthew Luther creates work in these spaces and pulls out elements that speak about invisible and insidious forces operating.
Luther’s current exhibition, “Reactive - A Simulated Color” at Greymatter Gallery, showcases his prints where snippets of multiple media are joined over the simulacra of paint, struck through by lines and sprays of airbrushed color. In some, a gray checked surface of a blank Adobe Photoshop canvas appears, like a note to signify the digital gestation that is part of the contemporary experience. Note that this is accessed only through the glow of the computer screen. Some of the fragments are anatomy diagrams, a call to the interactive world outside ourselves, and the interior environment of the body.
The prints in the exhibition are part of a series called “Reactive,” which is described as his cathartic reaction to an ongoing project known as “Canvas of Ruin.” This is an extension of Luther’s excavations into environmental repairs that result from Superfund sites in Milwaukee neighborhoods. In this iteration, he presents the interrelated natures of the human body, the digital world and the nature outside as linked through symbiotic correlations.
The video shown as part of this exhibition is a record of places affected by environments. He records slow-moving images of landscapes, varying from a boat drifting on a waterway in China to vistas of the Grand Canyon and Washington Island. The distinction between the two is not of beauty but of interference. Some are clouded by the descending haze of pollution. Smog takes a character like a romantic atmosphere, a caution to the distance between what we see and what is real. Bells from a temple in Wuhan, China chime in, and a nod to the spiritual veil of the mortal coil is added. All levels of our existence are entwined, but how do they weave together?
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Through March 19 at Greymatter Gallery, 207 E. Buffalo St., Suite 222.
