Featured Artist: Matthew Woodward

Chicago-based artist Matthew Woodward will be the featured artist in our inaugural 8-hour live-drawing event on March 14, 2015.

Woodward will also be giving a lecture on his work on March 13, 2015 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Matthew Woodward was born in Rochester New York in 1981. He was educated at the School of the Art institute of Chicago (BFA ’05) and the New York Academy of Art (MFA ’07). He is an instructor of Art at Dominican University and has given numerous lectures at schools and colleges throughout the United States.

Currently, Woodward lives and works in Chicago. He is represented at Linda Warren Projects. An exhibition of his work is currently scheduled for The Hyde Park Art Center in 2017.

Artist Statement:

My work searches the rote design logic of mechanically reproduced architectural ornamentation. An ornamentation which, originally meant as a cultural communicator, had been multiplied and repeated to a point that exhausted them of meaning as iconographic objects. My work attempts to excavate from an oft repeated utilitarian agency a formal material life that has been buried away in anonymity. In this way, then, the ornament is able to return from the dead, artificial and negating permanence of serial reproduction, and assume its original purpose as monolith, as cultural monument, a status it no longer covets. And inso doing, the works reintroduce to the built environment a performance of the very material life -the activity of ideas- that human recourse once sought to signify.

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