My work explores the visual language contained within a created object, the painting—a tactile image constructed of physical material, with suggestions of depth and flatness, demonstrating various pictorial constructions originating from how we see and experience real space, objects, matter, and life within the constraints of time.

This series is a narrative of a place losing the qualities that distinguish it from a space. The establishment of a sense of place is a psychological event that occurs when a person gains a connection to a physical location and moment through experience. This work explores the relationship between place and time in this process. I make this work to understand what happens to our understanding of a space as it changes.

My work is very material- and process-based, utilizing languages associated with painting, fiber, and printmaking. I create soft sculptures, paintings, and installations that point to the conversation on the isolated body, one that is going through mental and emotional etiology. Through the use of synthetic material such as faux fur, silicone, and other materials and processes associated with craft and print, I push the experience of the viewer to one that is disorienting and conducive of their own bodily awareness as it relates to surrounding objects. As

My work is a response to cultural artifacts, rituals, and beliefs. I investigate the processes, materials, and concepts that have been used to create objects and architecture. Within these diverse approaches to the maintenance of traditional practices there is the human need to satisfy personal desire. Rare objects, garments laden with color and texture, palaces with lavish gardens and tantalizing sensations for the palate, have influenced paradigms of commerce, culture, and science. Historical details reveal the common urge we have to please the senses. My work

In its worn and tattered state, the retired quilt reveals a rich history. With its faded colors marking the passage of time and its torn edges signaling the end of its utility, the quilt is stripped of both personal history and practical functionality. As a signifier of past experience, the quilt has become my metaphor for loss and persistence. Through stitch-by-stitch deconstruction, I remove the quilt’s central layer to expose the wear and tear within. Sometimes gaping, sometimes minor, the holes in the batting depict inner damage as well as profound beauty.

I examine landscape picture-making by building luxuriant, cinematically scaled paper paintings and installations. These combine romantic, utopian, and immersive sensibilities from both Chinese and Western landscape painting with a lexicon drawn from a personal mythology informed by my identity as a biracial, second-generation Asian American: ribbons, baubles, bats, peaches, sperm, piles of flowers repeated so many times as to appear biomorphic and alien but bursting with incongruous efflorescence.

Through the gestures of painting, drawing, and printmaking, my practice grasps at the notion of home in the context of a diasporic experience. Utilizing the material language of what would ordinarily be used to build a home in Southern Africa, my work employs the anecdote, the fragmented recollection, and a register of legibility. I am invested in a practice of close looking, exploring collective memory, and analyzing personal history; and in what is possible when the recognizable image or language begins to fall away.

My paintings are an exercise in unlearning and relearning how to see.

My recent series of paintings, titled Salt, explores the beauty and underlying fragility of the Bonneville Salt Flats in remote northwestern Utah. The remnant of an ancient saline lake and one of the flattest places on earth, this bleached and barren landscape is strikingly otherworldly. Climate change, nearby potash mining, and motor racing are imperiling the stability of the salt flats, and natural processes continually transform the landscape. Rain covers the blinding white flats with a reflective pool of shallow water, causing the

Matthew Hance’s current body of work is focused on the concept of memory. The ability to store and recall information is one of the most amazing capacities of higher organisms. Our memories encapsulate our sense of personal and cultural identity, and the meaning of our lives. Involuntary memory is not immediate memory, but something that seeps in when you’re not aware. Hence, the experience of an image is different each time, which ultimately offers fresh perspectives on something so familiar as a portrait. One way Hance achieves this in his work is by organizing