ABOUT THE ARTIST
Matthew Kratz is an experimental painter and photographer from Mohkinstsis, Treaty 7 Territory (Calgary) who likes wading deep in reading, exploring, and researching everything that interests him (nostalgia, history, and culture). Matthew works in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) on his art practice exploring nostalgic focus and quiet play. He is a keen participant in the local arts community, volunteering as the Board’s Vice Chair of Nocturne Halifax. In 2022, he received his MFA from NSCAD University where he held his MFA Thesis Exhibition, The Least Nostalgic, at the Anna Leonowens Gallery. Matthew has one self-published work, Hey, I See Fires, a collection of his painted recreations of unedited archival images from the Apollo missions to the Moon.
In his spare time, Matthew enjoys cooking, watching films, and going on walks. He is pursuing an MBA at Dalhousie University.
IMAGING nostalgia: Quiet Play
I recreate nostalgic imagery with two goals: (1) exploring the materiality of paint and (2) defining nostalgic focus with found/generated imagery through play. Historically, I use painting techniques, collage, or existing photographic processes. Today, these processes continue through my simulations, and conventional techniques are blurred through the use of photosensitivity — by making paint photosensitive to the light of the Sun.
Embracing technical inconsistency and quietness in my work enhances the historicist and ruinous effects that glow like embers from nostalgic objects. My interest lies in re-appropriated nostalgia — play that aims to elicit nostalgia and to encourage a reconstruction of a place free from time. I aestheticize the allure of memory so it may become symbolic of experience, rather than experienced directly.
Play, in the spirit of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, is the act of creating a world apart. Play represents both the freedom and emplacement of a grand game. Quiet play is an act—— a silent prayer before breakfast. Quiet play in my practice is both an act of maintaining my body of knowledge and conducting compositional experiments. Like a prayer, painting to me is an act of inner reflection—— a journey of feeling out for a little world through freedom and discipline.
My art is all dedicated to the betterment of expressing my perception of the times; the process is driven by the quiet play of nostalgia, and reflects the echoes of a timeless memory. With the same playful drive, I look towards the past to imagine what it would be like to experience once again. Yet, what of the future? With all that’s happened in the iconoclastic beginning of a third millennium and my experience, I must ask the question:
What does the future of nostalgia look like?
GLOSSARY
Atemporality:
Related to: retromania, hauntology, presentism, and super-hybridity.
“This is a temporal state in which […] the past and the future have been made available simultaneously. Instead of an information superhighway, we can picture the eternal present as an endlessly flat surface with vistas in every direction — not unlike the surface of a painting.”
~ Laura Hoptman, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World.
EMPLACEMENT:
“Wherever we are, we are emplaced, delimited by a horizon—not only literally but metaphorically, both semantically and ontologically. As we look in every direction, there is the horizon defining our world. Literally, this is the line demarcating the upper and lower hemispheres. The two surfaces—heaven and earth—meet at the horizon, constituting the finite space surrounding us.”
~ Krummel, J. W. M. (2019). Place and Horizon: Place and Response-Ability. In P. D. Hershock & R. T. Ames (Eds.), Philosophies of Place: An Intercultural Conversation (pp. 65–87) http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv7r43n5.7
creativity:
A dedication to identifying challenges and changes, driven to construct affective and evocative work. The motivation to refine and restructure; to adapt to an evolving world. A collection of habits formed through a persistent pursuit of belonging, an eye for observation, and a heightened personal sensitivity to the surrounding environment. A communal life philosophy: pull otherwise isolated ideas together and define otherwise obscured directions.
Re-Appropriated nostalgia:
The cultural phenomenon where past-themed market resources, such as brands or products, are utilized to engage in a playful, ironic, and hedonistic manner, devoid of any moralistic or melancholic undertones. It involves rendering past conditions as sites for entertainment, style, and fascination rather than for retrieving morality or shaping the future. This mode of nostalgia emphasizes the ironic and ludic dimensions of cultural style, using retro markers of taste to enliven the present; turning experience into symbolism. Through re-appropriation, consumers valourize past-themed brands as fashion items, playing with the spectacle of a past era without necessarily seeking authenticity or historical accuracy.
~ Derived from “Nostalgia Marketing and (Re-)Enchantment” by Benjamin Hartmann and Katja Brunk