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 technology that is already considered obsolete alongside processes that rely on industry-standard tools and software, his works aim to examine techno-cultural conditions within which contemporary images are produced and displayed. Frequently his works mirror familiar styles and traditional photographic categories, signalling their ideological coordinates. This enquiry, which attempts to consider the camera as part of a broader, technological apparatus, is intended as a way to think critically about images—how they are made, how they operate representationally, how they translate and permeate the world, and how they mediate perception. In his works, processes that have shaped images can be discerned, suspended within them, narrativising their internal architecture.

Before completing an MFA at Goldsmiths College, London, he began experimenting with and repurposing digital tools while studying digital media and design at Eastbourne College of Arts & Technology. Responsive to and co-extensive with technological and cultural shifts linked to images, Matthew Johnstone’s practice takes 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 extend an investigation of photographic techniques and method, into areas of thought and image-formation where ‘soft-technologies’ are understood as instrumental in the production of meaning. The notion of the anorganic is the point at which human and technological agency flow into one another, where intelligent ‘tools’ are woven intrinsically into both the development of, and conversations around images and their ideological relationships to material 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.