Matt Lipps
Untitled (Men)
In the series Horizons (2010) Matt Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form. For Untitled (Men) he snipped from magazines and textbooks pictures of handsome or famous men, from the ancient Greek to the modern. Arranged in a tableau, lit theatrically, and rephotographed, the two-dimensional figures have an embodied presence. While orange and blue lights transform them into a cohesive community, their ordered arrangement also draws out their smallness and flatness, deflating any hypothesis of a great empire or platonic ideal with one carefully calculated swipe.
Matt Lipps is a photographer whose strategies extend to include sculpture and installation. In his series Home (2008), jagged rocks and threatening ice floes impinge upon life-size domestic interiors. In a body of work entitled ‘70s (2004-2006), Lipps rephotographed 1970s male pornography, carefully lifting the models from their magazine pages, backing them with cardboard, and repositioning them amid contemporary, stage-lit bedspreads. Cropped elbows, toes, knees, and legs signal the switch in time and space, in a gesture of humorous transparency characteristic of his work.