“According to a recent report, the average American spends four hours daily watching television. In a culture where we seldom read the same books or see the same exhibitions or movies, television programs are often the rare common experience we share. When you consider the additional time we spend facing computer screens at work or for leisure, the number of hours spent in the glow of luminescent screens is staggering.”
Matthew Pillsbury

Matthew Pillsbury’s ‘Screen-Lives’ addresses the conundrum that technology has brought to our lives. We each have the possibility of instant global communication and yet we are increasingly physically isolated from each other.

Pillsbury’s interiors are images of people watching television or using computers. His use of long exposures turns the subjects into ghostlike echoes of their own actions and we are deprived of their likeness. Dramatic white light emitted from the screens reveal the rest of the interiors in exquisite detail. We are offered a more substantial impression of the subjects from their possessions rather than their blurred moving figures. Some of the interiors are windowless intimate rooms and others have views of vast city backdrops but all show a disquieting isolation.

The exhibition will also include a series of new and previously unseen images of the American Natural History Museum and The Rose Centre recently commissioned by the New York Times. Once again, using long exposures, Pillsbury captures the human traffic through the extraordinary space. The figures are absorbed in and illuminated by the screens and back lit displays of the institution. The visitors are transitory and shadow-like as they pass against the permanence of the exhibits.

An American born and raised in France, Matthew Pillsbury graduated from Yale University in 1995 (where he was awarded the Ethel Child Walker Prize for outstanding undergraduate artist) and has just completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Pillsbury’s work has previously been exhibited in America, and this is his first show in Europe. His work is held in several collections including the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Elton John’s Photography collection in Atlanta.