Matt McCormick

Long Distance Call continues Matt McCormick’s practice, which brings together images from disparate sources into contact, newly turning its attention more directly to how those very images arrive here. Pictures rarely reach us intact. Repeated, reproduced, retold, and passed between people and across generations, images hold narrative power and reference that transform based on form or beholder. An event experienced by one becomes a photograph seen by another, a family story is remembered by someone who wasn’t there, or an image is so widely circulated that its origin becomes secondary to everything it has come to represent.

Fusing painting, sculpture, installation, works on paper, and film, McCormick equally allows personal experience to exist alongside images whether encountered secondhand, inherited from others, or absorbed through the culture around us.

Eventually, these images begin to occupy the same landscape as lived experience. The distinction between something remembered, inherited, witnessed, or imagined becomes increasingly difficult to locate. While a central thread through McCormick’s work for over a decade, here, the very process of transmission itself moves to the forefront.

From the creation of an image to its reception, there exists an undeniable distance at once elastic and idiosyncratic. The works in Long Distance Call arise from what happens within that intermediary space of transmission. Images separated by generations, histories, and degrees of experience meet again under different circumstances. Looking to these newly formed encounters, McCormick’s exhibition is concerned less with recovering the original meaning of an image, than with understanding what it has become by the time it reaches us.

Matt McCormick’s (b. 1987, US) work operates at the intersection of cultural memory and material presence, distilling the residue of the American West into a highly personal yet broadly resonant visual language. Engaging with painting, drawing, and mixed media, McCormick’s practice navigates the tension between historic mythologies and contemporary detritus, where cowboys, highways, and Hollywood dreams dissolve into the textures of lived experience.

His work resists nostalgia, instead treating the American landscape as both a subject and a surface—one marked by erasure, reinvention, and cyclical decay. Fragments of signage, silhouettes of riders, and expanses of negative space suggest an inheritance in flux, a past that refuses to settle. Rather than reconstructing lost narratives, McCormick’s compositions act as palimpsests, where the West exists less as a fixed location and more as a shifting psychological terrain.

Informed by his time in Los Angeles and New York, McCormick’s art is as much about presence and transience as it is about identity and place. Through his practice, he locates poetry in fragmentation, exploring the American mythos not as a linear history but as a field of contradictions—unfinished, unsettled, and always in motion.

McCormick lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Miami, London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Aspen, and San Francisco. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.