MATTHEW PRUDEN
matt.pruden@gmail.com

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My work begins with informal historical research into cultural phenomena now fairly obscured from popular memory by the fog of time. I enjoy the disorienting time-travel, the novelty of the old, following strange threads that knot to the present in subtle, surprising ways. It's a great pleasure to stumble over illuminating, gem-like anecdotes and to stumble, too, over the dim roots of our contemporary attitudes and institutions.

Of particular potency for me are the interweavings of real and imagined landscapes, outer and inner spaces. It reveals the way in which the mind, through the tinted glasses of its cultural environment, perceives the physical world: assigning meanings, forging mythologies, and retranslating its experience into word and image for further consumption.

To cast a contemporary eye over, say, Victorian polar exploration or the Romantic lust for mountain peaks, is to see these barren places become strikingly blank screens onto which were projected the desires, fears, biases, and self-love of an age that directly produced our own.

Between the raw experience and the armchair fantasizing, the mediating role of literature, early photography, and painting is crucial: as historical record, myth-making power, and imaginative catalyst. My work ,then, is also a further translation, skeptical but affectionate, diverging and altered by my own interests as any translation. In attempting to make reductive, poetic objects from historical inspirations, I nevertheless hope to have them break free of the ice and move into wider, subtler, more subjective waters.