From the Hauser & Wirth exhibtion page:
Explore Works by Emerging Talent from One of America’s Leading MFA Programs
Hauser & Wirth is honored to host a presentation of thesis work by 19 MFA candidates from New York City’s Hunter College. Originally planned as physical exhibitions at their Tribeca campus this spring and postponed due to COVID-19, this digital spotlight provides a new platform for these emerging artists entering the field.
Part of the City University of New York (CUNY), Hunter College is a distinguished public university, and its MFA in Studio Art program offers students a critical framework to develop their artistic practice. Deeply rooted in the New York arts community, its alumni and faculty have shaped the landscape of contemporary art, and have made significant contributions to the field as artists, educators, and art professionals.
The Hunter College 2020 MFA Thesis Spotlight presents multimedia installations, sculpture, paintings, and video works in four thematic groupings, including ‘Gravity Spell’, ‘Thresholds’, ‘Interstices’, and ‘Save the Last Dance.’
Discover the candidates’ working processes through interviews and texts from Joachim Pissaro, Professor of Art History and Director of the Hunter College Galleries, and Carrie Moyer, Director of MFA Program in Studio Art.
From the artist's Hauser & Wirth page:
Citing medieval illumination and dream visions, rococo art, and the global climate crisis, Matt Jones (b. 1980, Rochester NY) engages ideas of intimacy, domesticity, and community in his ambitious colored pencil drawings and paintings.
‘For the last eight months I’ve been working exclusively with colored pencil on paper at one end of a lab table in my apartment, with my partner teaching at the other end, and our greyhound sleeping nearby. The onset of the pandemic necessarily changed my practice. In material and emotional terms there was no possibility to maintain “business as usual” as an oil painter. The references in these drawings have become simultaneously more local (old growth forest, the impacts of climate change and the pandemic, a longing for friends and family, drug and alcohol addiction) and more mythical (medieval illumination, Rococo painting, open world gaming, folklore).’
—Matt Jones
Joachim Pissarro on Matt Jones’s work:
Joachim Pissarro: Jones’s works completely reinvent the wheel with color pencil as a medium so that it becomes (to my eye, at least) almost impossible to differentiate between the subtlest caresses of the pencil, and the bombastic over-layered insistence of his crayon crushing on the surfaces.