Contact Information:

e-mail: mattbrack@yahoo.com
website: www.mattbrackett.com

Artist Statement:

My paintings emerge from a stream of consciousness sketching process that I have been using for six years to generate ideas. Often the sketches sit in my books for many months until, upon review, a handful begin to emerge as important. I then build off these sketched ideas to accumulate the variety of materials I use for painting, such as staged photographs of friends and family members, computer-aided montages and further sketches. This process feeds two current lines of work in my studio: a continuation of a body of large color paintings on canvas, and a line of much smaller monochromatic paintings on panels.

In my current series, "We All Have Something To Do", I use ambiguous action and metaphors from my carpentry trade to explore both familial demolition and reconstruction in settings from my late grandmother's childhood home. Her death over two years ago created a great insecurity for our family, and now we face the imminent loss of this ancestral house. I have found that the fugitive quality of each painting's meaning becomes an ally in exploring my emotions surrounding the house. This narrative uncertainty mirrors the actual uncertainty my family faces, and allows me to map and remap my own interpretations of each image as we move closer to letting the house go.

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