Ghostlier Demarcations

The Phatory LLC is pleased to announce Ghostlier Demarcations, the gallery’s second exhibition of John Matturri’s color photographs. The exhibition opens on March 30 and will run through April 30, with an artist’s reception held on Thursday, March 30 between 7 P.M. and 9 P.M. The gallery’s back room will feature Matturri’s performance photographs of Jack Smith.

 

In Ghostlier Demarcations, the city is Matturri’s subject in the truest sense of the word, and it is the most obedient of subjects, submitting, seemingly compliantly, to his will for order. Commonplace, ignored, and neglected objects and scenes are re-imagined to fit within the grid of his imagination, erasing, along with context, the confusion, disorder, and tedium of the everyday. These virtuoso photographs arrange the world coherently, but in this rearrangement is a shadow of immanent collapse; just outside the frame lies chaos. Matturri’s prints reveal and rescue fragments of a world, created at the collision of future and past in a momentary present, the suggestive objects reassembling themselves to outline the structures of a more perfectly imagined, though not entirely stable, world. The vision is transitory, the images transformative and suggestive. As Wallace Stevens wrote in "The Idea of Order at Key West," the photographs are works "of ourselves and of our origins, / in ghostlier demarcations."

 

A similar concern with imaginative order also provides the background for Matturri’s performance photographs of Jack Smith. He says, "Beneath the glittery surface, Smith’s work involved a tension between an awkward struggle for order and a fascination with an inevitable, often beautiful, collapse." Through a rigorous cropping and a somewhat incongruous desaturation of the original slides, Matturri’s prints allude to this side of Smith’s work.

 

John Matturri studied photography with Lisette Model and Ken Heyman. In the 1980s he performed slideshows under the general title of Circles of Confusion and performed improvised projections as parts of musical compositions by John Zorn. He has worked as a photographer for Jack Smith and Stuart Sherman, among others, and has performed in theater productions of Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, Stuart Sherman, Michael Kirby, and William Niederkorn. A portfolio of his photographs appeared in Michael Immerso, Coney Island: The People’s Playground (Rutgers University Press, 2002). Matturri currently teaches philosophy and film at Queens College and has written on avant-garde film, photography, performance art, and the cultural context of gravestone and memorial landscape design.