Through A Glass, Darkly:

5 MIN READ

Halloween has become America’s most popular secular holiday. It’s the one time of year in which we agree to celebrate the dead, the undead, the ghosts and ghouls, vampires, werewolves and zombies in a festival of all that is morbid. This makes the late-October timing perfect for the debut of Matthew Rolston’s latest personal work: Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, the culmination of a decade-long project of images made in the Capuchin Crypt in Palermo, Italy.

It is fair to say that Matthew Rolston, artist, photographer, music video director, creative director, and arts educator, is having what we call a ‘moment’. He recently received a lifetime achievement award from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he was once a student, where he has taught for many years, and where, in 1998, he endowed the Matthew Rolston Scholarship for Film and Creative Direction.

In connection with the award, there was a gala dinner held at ArtCenter during the College’s recent alumni reunion weekend in which Paul Martineau, curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, presented Matthew with the award, a distinction previously conferred upon other well-known ArtCenter alumni such as multimedia artists Diana Thater and Doug Aitken and photographers Lee Friedlander and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

As part of that alumni weekend, Matthew was interviewed on stage in ArtCenter’s Ahmanson auditorium by Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker writer Christina Binkley, and a second time, a week later, in the College’s Mullin Transportation Design Center presentation space by curator, art critic and USC professor Dr. Rotem Rozental on the subject of Matthew’s ArtCenter Vanitas exhibition. A triptych from Vanitas is on show there, timed to the release of a gorgeous large format art book, published by Nazraeli Press.

You can never predict what Matthew will do next. In his professional work, he has always loved to marry contradictions and highlight what he calls ‘the unity of opposites’ – when things are one thing and their opposite at the same time. He calls this cognitive dissonance “the special sauce.” What has always distinguished Matthew’s editorial work, as well as his personal fine art projects, is that although he works in what people believe to be an objective medium – photography – he is, in fact, a conceptual artist.

In Matthew’s portrait work, there has always been a self-aware irony present in how the subjects are styled and posed. For Interview, he often made contemporary black and white portraits using classic Hollywood lighting and staging reminiscent of MGM’s photographer George Hurrell, the golden-age master of glamour. In his work for Interview, as well as Rolling Stone (for whom he shot more than 100 covers), Matthew gave music legends the theatricality of vintage Hollywood stars. In his music video and commercial work, there is a certain maximalist tendency, as if the artists are icons – and more than a few were (or are).

In Matthew’s personal artworks, he has set a variety of challenges for himself. In the first of his fine art projects, Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits, he photographed ventriloquist dummies collected at the obscure Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell Kentucky. The oversized, square format and white backgrounds of the dummies’ spookily realistic portraits challenge us to consider what it is that makes us most human. Matthew describes the Vent Haven Portraits this way: “The Talking Heads project became a fine art series of monumentally scaled, forensic looking closeups that explore the sense of life in these inanimate objects and how we project our life force into images of humans.”

For Matthew’s second personal project, Art People: The Pageant Portraits, he photographed volunteer performers in elaborate costume and makeup as they impersonate well-known works of art in The Pageant of The Masters, the long-running summer performance of tableaux vivants in Laguna Beach, California. In this series, Matthew poses a series of questions: What is art? Who is an artist? And why do we make art? Are the figures in the Pageant Portraits themselves artworks – or do his photos make them so?

During his conversation with Christina Binkley at ArtCenter, relating to his move away from commissioned work, Matthew said that the more successful he became in his commercial career, and the more money was at stake for the client, the less creative freedom was at hand. At the same time, social media in all its forms was wresting control of celebrity image-making, in every sense, from the photographer to the subjects themselves. As an example, Matthew cited Kim Kardashian, who is in complete control of her image. At the same time, Matthew said, we are all becoming creative directors of our own ‘brands’.

His current series, Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, is an art project that has consumed Matthew for more than a decade. The Catacombe dei Cappuccini di Palermo is an ancient underground necropolis in Sicily, a crypt that has since become something of a macabre tourist attraction. The history of the crypt goes back to the 16th Century. When Palermo’s Capuchin monastery outgrew its cemetery, they built the crypt beneath, where in 1599, they mummified one of their order. At first, the crypt was restricted to their friars. However, over time, Palermo’s aristocratic and wealthy residents paid to be mummified there, often in their finest attire As long as their relatives paid, their corpses were maintained. The legend is that upon the rapture, those in the crypt would be among the first to enter the kingdom heaven. They remained standing in their finery, ready to be risen up. But by the 20th Century the crypt stopped taking in corpses and became a tourist attraction.

The crypt has been inspiration to a variety of artists over the years. Among the most notable are the Expressionist painter Otto Dix and Danish Symbolist Laurits Andersen Ring, the photographer/painter Sigmar Polke, and photographers Peter Hujar and Richard Avedon.