Matt Lipps
Untitled (Women)
In the series Horizons (2010) Matt Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form. Untitled (Women) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity. Lipps created this diptych by photographing a single arrangement of cutouts. As in his analogous portrait of men, the middle section appears twice, on either side of the split, signaling a stutter, a caesura, or a schizophrenic break. Within the cluster, fashion photography exists alongside frescoes, and demure piety butts up against unabashed sexuality. The women are bound not only by a fuchsia floodlight but also by a shared history. Western conceptions of beauty and eroticism are shown to sample widely and gluttonously, from tribal dance to a cowl-necked sweater.
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.