Matt Siber was born in Chicago in 1972, and grew up next to Boston in Brookline, MA. With a Bachelor’s degree in History and Geography from the University of Vermont in ’94, he received an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2003. Now primarily a gallery artist, his artwork is part of the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography and is represented by Galeria Antoni Pinyol in Reus, Spain, Galeria La Fabrica in Madrid, and Galerie f 5.6 in Munich. Matt also teaches beginning and advanced digital imaging at Columbia College Chicago.
There is a difference between what I have planned and what I am actually going to be able to do. My digital imaging classes meet for the first time this week so I will be preparing for those. I am in the process of looking for an assistant who knows Chinese and graphic design to help me with the new Chinese work for The Untitled Project. I’m hoping to delve into some tutorials for Final Cut Pro so I can begin editing the videos I made this summer. And I need to get started on a major website update.
I am very fortunate to have very supportive and involved parents. My parents are divorced but both of them are collectors of my work and are always interested in discussing the ideas within them. My parents are both medical doctors so the intellectual discourse is always fun and interesting. As an educator, I know full well that many people have quite the opposite experience to mine. Thanks Mom and Dad!
Aside from my family? I definitely look like my siblings and my parents. We have very strong genes in the family. I just asked my wife and she doesn’t think I look like anyone of note. I have had people tell me that I look like Jerry Seinfeld but I’m not sure I want to play that one up too much. No offense, Jerry.
Sight! I’m a visual artist! The others are great too but I love seeing. Is thinking a sense?
I’m a champion curler. Actually, no. Looks like fun, though. Most people probably don’t know that I entered my undergraduate program as a Pre-Med Biology major. My little brother ended up taking that route instead and he’s now a doctor of internal medicine in Massachusetts. In my younger years I was both a competitive cyclist and cross-country skier.
You bet it did! I am a strong believer in the liberal arts education. My history and geography degree in college gave me a fantastic grounding to do all kinds of things. Most of all, it gave me critical thinking skills that are oh so important these days. When I was finally ready to get my Masters in photography six years later, I was well armed with a ton of background information and perspective on the world. Grad school was extremely tough but it worked wonders on me.
Verisimilitude. Look, spell check already corrected it for me! It just seems to me that some of the letters in this word should be doubled.
Chicago has the most movable bridges of any city in the world. Take that, Amsterdam!
Oh! I’m trying to finish The Untitled Project while starting some new ideas and taking some work in progress to the next level. It’s a very challenging time for me as it’s the first time in my career where I am dealing with multiple projects in different stages of completion. I’d really like to get a book made of The Untitled Project but I’m also working on some video, graphic and 3D work these days. I’m really enjoying branching out into other media and I’m hoping that trend continues for me. Photo will always be a part of what I do, though.
I do teach and I hope to one day have a tenure track job at a college or university. These days the adjunct teaching pays my bills while art sales are grim. I love being an educator and I hope to continue teaching for as long as I can. It’s not really a plan B but more of an expansion of being an artist. Being in constant contact with young artists keeps me fresh and up-to-date and I really love the dialogue from fresh new minds.
I happened to run into Qiang Gao in his studio in Beijing back in June and was blown away by their new work. Unfortunately, it’s not on the web yet, perhaps because it might be sensitive material to the Chinese government. Here is an image from 2007 of a meeting of dictatorial tyrants like Mao, Hitler, Kim Jong Il, Osama bin Laden etc… They are very politically minded and are making work that often cannot be shown within China due to it’s critical nature. Brilliant and prolific!
I’ve been grooving on the Chinese art for several years now and Miao is one of my heroes. This is an older series where he composites these jam-packed urban scenes in major Chinese cities like Beijing. I don’t know his process in detail but the results are extremely effective. These images usually use horizontal layering to show us the sophisticated complexity of urban space. His other projects are also brilliant. He has no website but you can see his work on the site for Walsh Gallery in Chicago.
Stephanie is an excellent academic and art historian. Her most recent series of photographs directly references still life painting and appear very traditional. Her twist is that she leaves all the packaging and labeling on her subjects asking us to question our relationship to food in contemporary culture. I like that we naturally think about how and what we eat with these images but that she also points out the effect it has on other facets of culture, like art.
Lola is a former student of mine from the EFTI photography school in Madrid. I had the pleasure of reconnecting with her this summer while I was in town and she showed me this new work. She physically wraps everything in her scenes in clean, white paper. She is using her own domestic spaces and is interested in ideas of safety, security and protection of and within the home. Beautiful and thought provoking!
In my travels through Chicago’s biggest art gallery opening night of the year on Friday I came across these intriguing paintings by Amy Casey at Zg Gallery. I love the aesthetic of these paintings but there are also innumerable threads of meaning that can be derived from them. The houses and buildings can be read literally as a commentary on infrastructure or urban planning. They could also be more metaphoric alluding to connections between people, homes, technology, etc. Her statement addresses issues of natural disasters and security.
