Matthew Johnstone’s practice involves the reproduction, staging and display of objects and scenes from his 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 mode of representation, often utilising recent technology, considered obsolete, alongside processes that rely heavily on current industry-standard tools and software, his works aim to examine techno-cultural conditions within which images are produced and consumed. Frequently his works mirror vernacular styles, adopting the language of traditional photographic categories alongside that of commercial imagery. This enquiry, which tries to negotiate the camera as part of a broader, often seamless, technological apparatus, is intended as a way to think critically about images—how they are made, how they translate and permeate the world, and how they mediate perception.

In his practice, processes that have shaped resulting images can be discerned, via the initial act of looking and its translation in taking a photograph, images transmute as they are manipulated further. Like the objects and scenes represented in them, underlying technical means and their symbolisation stir ambiguously, narrativising an internal architecture and disrupting the surface of the seamless visual. This method intentionally stands in contrast to the neutrality often ascribed passively to media in the conventional discourse around photographic images, approaches to authorship, representation and human agency. With this in mind, his images embody our complicated entanglement with the technologies that make them and that are, as such, instrumental in the production of their meaning.

Before completing an MFA at Goldsmiths College, London, he began experimenting with and repurposing digital tools and processes while studying digital media design at Eastbourne College of Arts & Technology. Responsive to and co-extensive with technological shifts linked to images, Matthew Johnstone’s practice is grounded in a techno-theoretical approach that is as interested in the history of photographic technique, as much as it is inspired by media-theory and the aestheticisation of technology. His research is framed by the ideas of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Joanna Zylinska, Katherine. N. Hayles, Gregory Bateson, Mark Fisher, Vilém Flusser, Jean Baudrillard & Kaja Silverman.

His works aim to extend an investigation of photographic method, into areas of thought and image-formation where soft-technologies and human-centred authorial autonomy are problematised by the notion of the anorganic as the point at which human and technological agency flow into one another. Intelligent ‘tools’, human interiority and technical media are bound together as structurally intrinsic to the development, and contemporary experience of technology and its ideological relationships to material and aesthetic identity.

Matthew Johnstone (b1981, 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.