AUGUST'S FEATURED ARTIST || Matthew Gamber

Matthew Gamber recently completed his MFA in photography from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Featured online are a suite of images produced in his native state of Ohio (during which he earned a BFA from Bowling Green State University) and his adopted home of Massachusetts. Gamber’s color work deals with this move from country to city and his personal negotiation of these two spaces and two lives. Many of his images showcase dualities of this experience via choice of setting, lighting, or subject. In contrast to the busy and dim, yet somehow luminous and intimate interior spaces of his parent’s home in Ohio, Gamber’s depiction of his apartment and its environs in Jamaica Plain are stark, minimal studies of contrast and urban adaptation.

Gamber has shown at the Oni Gallery, Texas Photographic Society, and artSPACE@16. Recently, his work has been featured at the Laconia Lofts Gallery, the Griffin Museum of Photography annual juried exhibition and the Boston Drawing Project at the Bernard Toale Gallery.

Currently, Gamber teaches and lectures at Massachusetts College of Art, SMFA, and Middlesex Community College. Gamber is the new Executive Editor of BigRedandShiny.com, an online arts magazine for the discussion and promotion of the Boston arts scene. Additionally, he will be featured in a show this November at Gallery Kayafas.

- Leslie K. Brown, PRC Curator

Click here for Gamber's web site
Click here for BigRedandShiny.com

PAST PRESENTATIONS

Matthew Gamber
August 2004

Mariliana Arvelo
 July 2004

Ken Richardson
June 2004

Julie Melton
May 2004

Marlo Marrero
April 2004

Erik Gould
March 2004

Mori Insinger
February 2004

Jen Kodis
January 2004

Amber Davis
December 2003

Paul Taggart
November 2003

Marla Sweeney
October 2003

Dylan Vitone
September 2003

Click here for more information
about the Northeast Exposure.

 


CURRENT PROJECTS

Countrypolitan

If farming were considered a disease, the place I’m from would be considered recovering from it.  On a map, the space is squares; as a place, the air is cold in the winter.  This makes it hard to breathe, though it’s harder to find something that makes you want to keep breathing.

After migrating to the city, I became painfully aware of how provincial my perceptions had been. The insult to injury was that the new individuals I had encountered seemed to know that about me ahead of time.  Someone told me that Midwesterners carry this belief that the greatest destination always exists somewhere else, even if they are already there.  My suitcases are not near large enough to cover that kind of wardrobe requirement.

These photographs negotiate a paradox of desiring to appear as both folkish and cosmopolitan.  Romanticizing both “the country” and “the city”, I encounter an intersection of class and culture through objects I own within familiar surroundings. Attempting to glamorize this lifestyle to myself, I become caught in the middle of what I remember to be and what I desire to become.  I am left seeing myself as a fool - a result that forbids the possibility of either illusion.

- Matthew Gamber

Selections from Boston
click each image for larger version and caption

Selections from Ohio
click each image for larger version and caption