Artist Statement

“I am a painter and a collagist. I work with glue and printed material as well as acrylic paint and ink. The printed materials that I work with derive from archaic educational and cognitive sources, such as maps, atlases, encyclopedias, and school textbooks. I am drawn to the ephemeral nature of this printed information and the latent content that surfaces over time. I like to catalog, archive, and arrange information and then dismantle, manipulate, and reconfigure it. My creative process is informed by the visual properties and informative complexities of the material I am using.

“These altered book pages are part of an ongoing project titled Defacements. The pages were taken from elementary school textbooks and then defaced by scraping and sanding away all text except for a few words. The remaining words create a new caption for the existing illustration much like the delinquent student who marks up a textbook with irreverent commentary. Although the message might be the same, the process is reductive and only emphasizes a subtext which may have already existed.”

- Matthew Cusick, 2010

Matthew Cusick was born in New York City in 1970 and graduated from the Cooper Union with a BFA in 1993. He has shown his work internationally since 1995, including New York exhibitions at Andrew Kreps Gallery, Kent Gallery and most recently the Pavel Zoubok Gallery.

Since becoming a Texas resident in 2007 and a father in 2008, Matthew has been concentrating on material closely bound to his own personal history, specifically the historical, literary and religious texts of his Catholic school education. With these printed materials, Cusick dissects and reconfigures tangled threads of thought into provocative visual distillations. His treatment of these school books reenacts the rebellious thoughts of an irreverent student frustrated by the classroom’s arbitrary logic and inconsistent teachings (it is no coincidence that a bible he cut up was printed in 1981, the same year he was expelled from Catholic school). Much of Cusick’s work sets the stage for an impending battle, evoking the calm before the storm. In his text-based series of work, he stages the conflict between visual and verbal modes of thought. Grammar is displaced and language re-ordered according to tonality, form and other visual criteria. This undermines the power of rhetorical structures and allows new meanings to emerge. By employing a cut-up method similar to concrete poetry, Cusick injects passages of text with an “inoculation against the language virus,” to use the metaphor of William Burroughs, one of the technique’s notable proponents.

Matthew Cusick’s work is held in numerous public and private collections including The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and The Progressive Art Collection. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, ArtKrush, TimeOut, Flaunt, and V Magazine. He was the recipient of a NYFA Painting Fellowship in 2006 and a Residency Fellowship at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in 2008 and has been a Visiting Artist at The Cooper Union and The University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Cusick was also nominated for the prestigious Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award in 2008 and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2009. He now resides in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, Texas.

Matthew Cusick - gallery portfolio (coming soon)
Matthew Cusick - Curriculum Vitae (.pdf, 310k)
Matthew Cusick - website