Reviews

Traditionally, art has commemorated people, places and events, lest they be lost to the sands of time.  But what happens when those shifting sands are the things being commemorated?  Matthew Picton’s exhibition of ten recent works provides fascinating answers.  The dates of these works range from 2016 to 2023, pointing

Why, as of late, have so many artists taken up mapping as a means of representing the world?  One apparent reason is that maps are prescriptive. They supply directions that can be reliably followed. Artist-made maps, by contrast, challenge consensus reality by subjecting “facts” to experience and imagination, depicting the

Matthew Picton, in his exhibition The Age of Kali at Nancy Toomey Fine Art, has created a stunning body of hand-cut mixed media works filled with vitality, historical context, precision, and depth. Through the collating of images and the collapsing of time, dynamic representations of divinity are placed in the

Matthew Picton’s work investigates a city’s narratives, its history and its literary heritage, using texts and materials evocative of the events that define it. He achieves by building cartographic representations from distinct periods in the city’s history. The paper sculptures are all made by hand each piece cut and formed

Matthew Picton: Fictional Perspectives: Paper sculpture July 2013 Ambitious artists in every discipline face the difficulty of working something of the world into what they make. Some years ago, London-born Oregonian Matthew Picton resorted to maps as a solution. His new work at Toomey Tourell continues to expand on the

Matthew Picton @ Toomey Tourell June 2013 If you’ve ever used Google Earth to zoom from a bird’s eye view of the planet down to a close-up look at rooftops, streets, backyards and rivers, Matthew Picton’s wall-mounted sculptures of urban environments will seem instantly familiar. They reconstruct in paper and

July 13, 2011 Special to The Oregonian By John Motley In the early 2000s, Ashland-based sculptor Matthew Picton was one of Oregon’s most critically revered artists. (read article here)

Matthew Picton at Pulliam Gallery, Portland, Oregon Recommendation by Richard Speer Continuing through July 30, 2011 British-American conceptual artist Matthew Picton has long traversed the intersection of topography and sculpture. (read the article here)

Paths of Destruction: Neidhardt, Picton and Verbeisen It’s rare when there is a theme amongst some of the better shows in Portland but that is just what is happening this July. Maybe it is a sign of our turbulent times or the simple fact that a few galleries want to

Map artist Matthew Picton’s paper cities – including Washington By Maura Judkis I can see where the Washington Post office would be on Matthew Picton’s sculpture of Washington, D.C., and it’s thankfully not one of the spots with the burn marks that char various parts of our city. Go ahead,

Matthew Picton’s Urban Narratives Friday 02 March 2012 Cities are often described as living organisms; viewed as subject rather than object. Matthew Picton, whose exhibition Urban Narratives opens next week, engages with this tradition of humanizing the city by deconstructing the clean, uncompromising aesthetic of the cartographic city plan and

Matthew Picton : Urban Narratives Sumarria Lunn, London by William Irwin For a craft whose origins lie in the practical science of navigation, the enduring appeal of cartography as art is remarkable. Most often appreciated as windows into the past or as exquisite works of craftsmanship, artist Matthew Picton expands

Matthew Picton Christopher Henry Gallery, New York by Emily Hall A map, reductive by definition, is full of ghosts. Matthew Picton engages these specters with paper sculptures that add a third dimension to the map and in various ways give from to imaginary cartographies of history. Indeed, he renders his

London, March 2012 Seen here for the first time in print is Venice, a new work by artist Matthew Picton. It is made from the pages of the 1911 novel Death in Venice by Thomas Mann and the musical score for its operatic interpretation by composer Benjamin Brittan. The edges

Sculpting the History of a City Nate Berg Dec 13, 2011 The Atlantic Cities A city is shape and form, but also politics and history–qualities hard to capture in a map. But with his paper sculptures of cities, artist Matthew Picton delves into not only the physical form of a

Masterworks of Destruction by Kenneth Baker Saturday, April 17, 2010 Picton and Burbridge at Toomey Tourell: Londoner Claire Burbridge and Portlander Matthew Picton share space at Toomey Tourell in a show that defines mixed success. Burbridge offers small bronze and wax human figures, draped or seminude, and modeled from life.

An Art of Beautiful Fissures by Victoria Blake Matthew Picton has come a long way since his last solo show in Portland, in 2005.  At the time, he was obsessed with the smallest, most inconsequential of things — the cracks in the sidewalk, for example.  his work had a labor

Layered mapping charts troubled urban histories by Adriana Grant In his fourth solo show at Howard House, Matthew Picton works in Duralar, paper and stick pins to create evocative urban landscapes shaped by war. Israel is shown in three permutations (1936, 1947-1967 and 2007) with the vagaries of history depicted

Amsterdam in 3D by Adriana Grant London — born Oregon artist Matthew Picton is a mapmaker, charting cities by waterway, road, and train.  He creates lush overlays of wandering lines with a very sketchlike hand.  Crafted out of Dura-Lar  (plastic sheeting sinilar in texture to Mylar) and pinned to foam

Review by John Motley, October 2007 London-born artist Matthew Picton, who lives and works in Ashland, Oregon, is best known for his spidery sculptures of the cracked surfaces of alleys and roads.  In those works, Picton traces the cracks’ forking contours, creating material representations of the pavement’s splits ad gaps

The Cracked Lake Bed Sculptures Two exhibits now at Howard House use a rich material base to explore realism, perception and “found” subject matter. Matthew Picton’s work has the look of the confectioners art, something like miniature mountain ranges shaped from the drippings of colored sugar. In fact, the glowing

Landscape at the Limit by Dinah Ryan Ingrid Calame and Matthew Picton engage with this more complex situation, conceptually and to a certain extent formally..cracked Lake Bed, Emigrant Lake, Oregon, 2002, Picton’s translucent resin sculpture resembling miniature topographical models of geologic formations, is cast from a dried lakebed. Revealing unexpected

Matthew Picton at Howard House THE STRANGER CALENDAR All but two of Matthew Picton’s maps are rendered in plastic beads and resin, transforming a utility into a glittering string of jewels.They are both surprising and not, a formalist approach to a city’s soul:’ New York Subway is a dense and

Seattle Weekly Visual Arts Pick by Molly Lori You may have taken notice of cracks in the pavement; maybe you’ve even contemplated them. But you’ve got nothing on Oregon’s Matthew Picton. The London-born artist captures the spaces between the cracks, crannies, and crooks in parking lots, streets, lakes, ocean beds,

Creativity Comes Slipping Through The Cracks Contemporary artists inherit from the modernist past a set of quandaries rather than a tradition. One such problem concerns how, or whether, to originate form, irrespective of the medium in hand. British-born Oregonian Matthew Picton literally finds figures on the ground–in the patterns of

Matthew Picton’s Transporting Beads by Kenneth Baker Performance, conceptual and land art have involved maps since the early work of Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim and Richard Long. But probably no one has handled them before with the comic decorative flair of Matthew Picton’s work at Toomey Tourell. Gluing clear acrylic

Picton’s Maps are Colorful Sculptures of Metro Areas by Theresa Bembnister London -born Matthew Picton models his artworks on maps of major cities: Berlin, Sydney, New Delhi. But as seen in his exhibit of new work at Byron C. Cohen Gallery, it wouldn’t do much good to keep one of

Dressing Demise by Richard Speer Matthew Picton outfits destruction and decay in Day-Glo finery “Let us recognize the fact once and for all…”, wrote Piet Mondrian in 1920. “If you follow nature, you will not be able to vanquish the tragic in your art.” The great neoplasticist saw the processes

Composition from Decomposition by Christopher Knight Los Angeles artist Ingrid Calame has indirectly spawned a number of artists who do variations on her well-known technique of transcribing stains found on city streets and sidewalks. Among the more interesting isMatthew Picton, a London-born, Oregon-based artist having his first solo show at

Matthew Picton at Toomey Turrell by Katie Kurtz We so often take our relationships with people and with our environment for granted, assuming that the people will always be there and the landscape around us will remain the same. Then a hurricane sweeps through, you’re dislocated, and suddenly everything is