Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder?

This Place Called Home

Matt Wilson

February 12 – March 14, 2009



I feel a little guilty for liking Matt Wilson’s photographs so much, mainly because I like them without hesitation. You see, I’ve been trained by the church of the twentieth century (and what little there has been of the twenty first) only to like art that has put me through the stages of art grief: disorientation, rejection, self doubt, re-evaluation and then finally, acceptance/like. I am trained to ignore art that gives me an immediate, pure sense of satisfaction on the grounds that anything that hasn’t been wrestled with cannot be trusted to mean something real. That very well may be true, but it also assumes that there are rules for what makes good art.

The next battle to be overcome in this epic of my star-crossed art love, is photography. This medium seems unsettled in the art world; no one is sure what it is supposed to do, or how it should be handled. I don’t trust Matt Wilson’s farmhouse sitting on a grassy windswept hill in the warm twilight of a summer evening-I know it’s my nostalgia he has captured—but the fact that it's a photograph makes me want to believe it anyway. The images are small, and looking at them feels a little like peeking curiously through glowing keyholes: these images are innocent, there is nothing about the hardness of living in them. Cars veer around midnight corners in a blur of happy adrenaline, children pull brightly colored shirts over their faces to hide from things they don’t like and laugh while the world spins behind them, youth stands in the warm light of a sweaty street corner, and the texture of the rooftops is reflected in the texture of the street. I want to live in Wilson’s mediated reality, where he uses photography to pretend things could feel this perfect in life.

Show me this again in two months and my cynicism may seep back in and remind me to disregard Matt Wilson and call him sappy or pointless. But like anyone who has just fallen in love at first sight, it feels too good to be talked out if it.