Matthew Johnstone’s practice involves the reproduction, staging and display of objects and scenes from his surrounding environment to create works that are primarily rooted in digital photographic processes and media. His approach to image-making directly addresses the camera as a means of representation. Often utilising technology already considered obsolete alongside processes that repurpose industry-standard digital tools, his works examine the broader techno-cultural systems within which images are made signalling their ideological coordinates. This relocates the camera within a complex technological apparatus that can be engaged with as a means to think contemplatively about the nature of images—how they are made, how they translate the world and how they mediate perception. In his work, processes that have shaped images can be slowly discerned, suspended within them, narrativising their internal architecture.

Before completing an MFA in Art Practice at Goldsmiths College, London, he began repurposing the use of digital tools while studying Digital Media Design at Eastbourne College of Arts & Technology. Responsive to and co-extensive with technological and cultural shifts linked to images, Matthew Johnstone’s practice is research-led, taking a techno-theoretical approach that is as interested in the history of photography as much as it is inspired by media-theory and the ideas of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Joanna Zylinska, Victor Burgin, Kaja Silverman, Vilém Flusser, Jean Baudrillard & Mark Fisher.

His works aim to critically extend photographic techniques and method, into technologically centred fields of thought, aesthetics and image-formation where ‘soft-technologies’ are understood as equally instrumental in the production of meaning. In these areas intelligent ‘tools’ are woven intrinsically into both the development of, and conversations around images and their ideological relationships to material identity.

Matthew Johnstone (b*1981 London) lives and works in Berlin. He has had a number of solo and group exhibitions including BAS Galerie, Berlin, The Composing Rooms, London, Jerwood Foundation, London and HD:projects, New York. His works have been featured in Wonderland magazine, Novembre Global, Dazed and Confused magazine and have also been featured as part of Rhizome’s artist profile series.