Matt Magee

Matt Magee: Works 2012-2018 covers a period when Magee transitioned to Phoenix, Arizona, in 2012 after living and working in New York City for thirty years. Since moving to the Southwest, his art explores language and communication as investigative acts. He mines materiality, navigation, landscape, repetition, process, texting and email to produce paintings and objects that explore alternative ways of understanding surface and sequence. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Magee went with his geologist father (up until his death in 2008) on field trips from their home base in Texas to visit Native American rock art sites throughout the American West and saw hundreds if not thousands of pictographs and petroglyphs. In his twenties, he saw that this flat glyphic information sharing related to images he was seeing in art history courses, and the idea that meaning could be imparted through simple formal gesture and mark making was an early lesson