Matthew Whitney

Artist Statement

My work as an artist is an ongoing exploration into the connections between people, places, and the everyday, manifesting as processes of walking, mapping, and mark-making. Rather than over-program an artwork, I often allow and introduce flawed conditions in which a new path can emerge, a mistake can surprise, or a failure offers discovery. It’s the freedom that comes with wandering a city street grid, though paradoxically that grid determines our paths. It’s choosing an open field over pre-determined trails. Within the intersections of the lines, be they steps or marks, new possibilities continue to reveal themselves.

My work arises from a lifelong pursuit of experience rather than representation. Influenced by Czesław Miłosz’s reflection on William Blake—an ever-seeking chase after self-renewing meaning—I understand myself as an “ever-seeker,” attentive to this one life as it unfolds through the body, the senses, and lived encounter.

I distinguish experience from thought, as a space to escape the overthinking mind. Thought organizes, categorizes, narrates; experience disrupts. It is felt before it is understood. Art, for me, is not primarily an object or a story, but a site where experience can re-emerge—through touch, intuition, material resistance, and play. In moments when thinking recedes, making becomes sensory and immediate, and occasionally something ineffable appears—beauty, sublimity, or what one might call the sacred.