Quinn Matthews

Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark

Artist statement

In a conceptual practice I am primarily concerned with predictiveness and perception -images composed around something that has not yet happened, recurrence, or something that is about to be lost. My work is lens-based and often realized as photographic image and film, but also through various materialities and sculptural capacities to interrogate what is legible as an image. Photography inherently arrives late, and the delay between exposure and audience lets an urgent subject become historical before anyone acts on it. Working against that delay and the idea of a late image is the concern I call anticipatory aesthetics. By making legible potential futures through the work, we can act preventively rather than reactively. The method follows: I intervene in images while they are still unsettled, still participating in the world rather than indexing it. Across parallel projects, my practice responds to tensions present throughout surveillance, the climate crisis, and politics -a discontinued reconnaissance film aimed at damaged landscapes, urgently portraying a loss imperceivable to unauthored viewership; a live feed before anything has happened on it; a Jesus 2024 campaign flag, a monument to a state of anticipation; a proposed iteration of the US flag for the current administration's Freedom 250 campaign. By forgoing familiarity through recontextualization, the work reconsiders expected literacies.

Artwork