Interview by students of Dennis Matthews

Interview with Dennis Matthews
a short survey of questions given to the artist on October 24, 2007

Dennis Matthews is a current graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As he prepares to leave school, possibly for good, he reflects on where his work begins and his particular angle of what to be a working artist means. An organizer of many shows and events, mostly out of lack of other hobbies he would say, Dennis Matthews has been involved with the arts for nearly a decade. His entire life has been broken into short periods of living across the United States and the world, not one to settle or to be happy with just maintaining a mediocre view or acceptance of what’s presented to him. His current projects involve arranging his own lectures, exhibitions, teaching, and “keeping a few paintings in circulation”. Most recently the work has been shown at the Chicago Art Open and at the 101 Paintings Show at Co-Prosperity Sphere. The biggest project he embarked on over summer 2007, is to present the 2005 Venice Bienalle representative of India, Ranbir Kaleka at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in late November as a Visiting Artist. He would say jokingly that, “Its just a little of what I do here.”.

1. Although you have done many different kinds of work, do you have a process or aspects that you always use?
2. Are the artists that you are most drawn to visible or apparent in your own work?
3. Where does your inspiration come from?
4. How do you take drawing into painting? How do you approach color?
5. Do you sketch first? Do the abstract shapes create an image? Do you know what it’ll look like?
6. What are you trying to accomplish with your paintings? What’s your thematic focus?
7. Does the MFA program at SAIC provide real insight on how to build a career as an artist? Once you graduate, do you feel as though you will be equipped to accomplish your dreams or goals?
8. If you were going to start a movement, what would you call it?
9. If art was not an option, what would you do with yourself?

1. I think it comes down to rely on a very involved process. Very hands-on approach. I started art as a screen printer, working with an ex-graphic designer. I’ve been into photography at times, the crop, composition is a the most relevant pain in photography whether as attempting it or as a viewer.
2. I think a lot about the structuring of my favorite works, the step by step, the how did they do it. People like Wifredo Lam aren’t stylistically apparent in my work but the concern of décor versus an attention to detail. What’s there and what’s just out of frame is important.
3. Many areas, recently I’ve been thinking of comparisons and how anything one knows is by way of referring to another thing we assume as related. A “its just got to be this way” moment, that helps us understand why we’re still looking at an object or idea in art. I’ve also been looking at patterning, décor, and how they can be used to redirect one’s focus in viewing a work to literally highlight the comparisons being made.
4. I feel like I am always drawing at every stage of a work. My videos even rely on a ‘drawing’, a schematic. Even the drippy, gestural areas are careful and lengthy.
5. I have photographic evidence of sketches. I wouldn’t say at any point that I was an image-maker. Its all comparative, relational, I’m interested in developing curious relationships within each painting.
6. A reverberation is the aim not a communicatory thing. A pinball machine way of viewing, even if one does not follow how to enter or leave a work they’ll bounce around.
7. Yes. Yes. Both. “…as an artist?” It’s the agenda of the individual artist of how they’ll choose to function in the system of the art world. My peers would only be lost if they weren’t looking at function and only at developing connections.
8. I don’t really believe in movements. It gets really complicated and artists tend to get tacked onto something that they weren’t that interested in, a don’t judge me by the company I keep thing.
9. Probably be someone’s accountant, you know a business I was comfortable with. Everything in my work is pretty calculated, its my approach to many things.