Opened Cities

The Phatory is pleased to announce the opening of Opened Cities, an exhibition of color photographs by John Matturri. The exhibition opens on April 22 and runs through May 16. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on April 22, 2004, between 7 and 9 P.M.

Coming out of the tradition of street photography, but sharpened by a rigorous, minimalist sensibility, John Matturri’s photographs explore, unmask, penetrate the everyday chaos of the City--its detritus and clutter, grimy windows and peeling paint, graffiti and torn posters, self-absorbed, hurrying crowds-- to reveal a world of precision and clarity, as a breathtakingly cool order emerges from, indeed, imposes itself on the city’s blur. The bold and deceptively simple images in “Opened Cities” resist the seductiveness of a city’s grandeur, while making new, often troubling demands on the idea of beauty itself. Matturri’s photographs ask much of the viewer but, in return, give, to quote T.S. Eliot’s Prelude: “such a vision of the street/As the street hardly understands.”

John Matturri studied photography with Lisette Model and Ken Heyman. In the 1980s he did slide performances under the general title of Circles of Confusion and performed improvised projections as elements of musical compositions by John Zorn. A portfolio of his photographs appeared in Michael Immerso, Coney Island: The People’s Playground (Rutgers University Press, 2002). He has worked as a photographer and cinematographer for Jack Smith and Stuart Sherman, among others, and has performed in theatre productions of Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, Stuart Sherman, Michael Kirby, and William Niederkorn. Matturri has taught in the philosophy departments at Queens College, NYU, School of Visual Arts, and Marymount Manhattan. His philosophical interests include cognitive science approaches to visual art, recognitional theories of depiction, and the metaphysics of fiction. He has written on avant-garde film, photography, performance art, and the cultural context of gravestone and memorial landscape design.