We are proud to share news that Matt Eich has been selected for inclusion in FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art 2022. Eich’s work has been curated into a 2-man show with Tyler Mitchell by Barbara Tannenbaum for The Cleveland Museum of Art. Sunlight, Shadow, and A Rainbow: Matt Eich and Tyler Mitchell underscores the contemporary photographers’ overlapping subjects of interest and foundational knowledge. Both take interest in belonging, transformation, and the American South and have worked in commercial and fine art realms.
Sunlight, Shadow, and A Rainbow: Matt Eich and Tyler Mitchell at the Cleveland Museum of Art blurs all lines between candid and staged images, fine art and commercial strategies. The result is painterly yet graphic works that stick in your mind like a memory you already found there. The works are poetic and emotional, full of transitory sensation- a moment captured when anything was possible.
Eich and Mitchell set joyful scenes of relaxation, languor, and personal contentment into the Southern landscape. Both artists use photography, a medium most often associated with recording fact, to suggest the possibilities of transformation, a delight in the senses, and the engaging mystery of the transitory.
REVIEWS:
Eich’s lyrical and poised images . . . seem driven by the impulse to capture transitory moments of heightened perception, whether sparked by the sight of distant cumulus clouds or one of his daughters twirling a bouquet of wildflowers. One particularly beautiful image, entitled “Meira Rainbow,’’ 2021, captures rays of light refracted through a prism as they fall across the face of Eich’s older daughter in a darkened room, grazing her nose, left eye, and blonde hair. The image turns a random moment into something transcendent.
- Steven Litt, Cleveland.com
At the Cleveland Museum of Art, Sunlight, Shadow, and a Rainbow, couples the work of photographers Matt Eich and Tyler Mitchell. Upending assumptions around the documentary characteristics of photography, both artists stage portraits of pastoral life. In lieu of intermingled work, the exhibition is installed as two sides meeting in the middle, with Eich on the left and Mitchell on the right. Despite this separation, formal rapports and rhythms skip across the gallery: the blur of a girl twirling a flower in a portrait by Eich is matched across the room in an unfocused still by Mitchell of a child being spun in the air.
- Alexandra Drexelius, ruckus
About FRONT: Launched in 2018, FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art 2022 features over 75 regional, national, and international artists and encompasses over twenty sites in Cleveland, Akron, and Oberlin. The Triennial, Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows bears witness to the region’s past and present. It contemplates scars from environmental degradation caused by industrial production to police violence and urban fracture. It also acknowledges the region’s leadership in collective care. Today, healing is contemporary Cleveland’s biggest industry: Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in Akron and the Art Therapy Studio is one of the nation’s first such independent institutions.
FRONT 2022 approaches the slow process of curating as a way to leave lasting traces upon civic and cultural infrastructures, while also embracing the ephemeral glimpses of beauty that art — like a rainbow — can still offer.
37.5 x 50 in. pigment print | 39.5 x 52 in. framed
Edition of 2