MaTTHew MoGle Exhibition

ReCOLLECTIONS  

April 28 - June 30

Matthew Mogle was born in Illinois and earned his MFA from the New York Academy of Art, Graduate School of Figurative Art in 2004. Matthew’s paintings have been exhibited both nationally and internationally in galleries and museums. He was a project manager and engineer/draftsman for two nationally recognized custom fabrication companies in Chicago, IL where he designed everything from opera sets to museum interactives for clients across the country. He currently lives in Statesboro, GA, where he is an Assistant Professor and Foundations Director in the Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art at Georgia Southern University.

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Artist Statement
My current body of work is influenced by the subversive nature of sticker art culture and its roots in the social commentary of street art. Like sticker culture, my paintings include art historical and pop-culture imagery that I unapologetically rip off, alter, and repurpose to exploit generational attachments to nostalgia and construct romanticized narratives and recollections of self.  

My paintings are stickered with visual fragments of memories to reconcile my present identity with past experiences associated with love, loss, betrayal, and mortality. Like social media personas, these fictional and nonfictional curations form personal mythology. As time passes, my ability to retain memories degrades due to chronic Lyme disease. I'm interested in the distortions within these personal narratives as memories of events grow less precise to the point of being totally false with each retrieval. To express this distortion, paintings are revisited and reinterpreted each year. New stickers are added or replaced and titles are changed to represent the futile attempts to collect memories and assemble an accurate reality. The collections of stickers seek to codify narrative interpretations through their association to popular culture and art history. The disparate fragments burden the viewer with the same difficulty recalling memories I have due to my chronic disease.  

Currently, I’m exploring the commercial manufacturing and aesthetics of stickers to further explore their materiality. This includes the use of glitter, pearlescent, opalescence, neon, metal leaf, holographic, and glitter vinyl. As I explore the intersection of sticker aesthetics with my classical training in oil painting, I’m using augmented reality technology as a way to enhance or distort perceptions, associations, and interpretations.