Matt McCormick (b. 1987, US) presents Long Distance Call, his first solo exhibition with Ruttkowski;68.

Long Distance Call continues Matt McCormick’s practice, which brings together images from disparate sources into contact, newly turning its attention more directly to how those very images arrive here. Pictures rarely reach us intact. Repeated, reproduced, retold, and passed between people and across generations, images hold narrative power and reference that transform based on form or beholder. An event experienced by one becomes a photograph seen by another, a family story is remembered by someone who wasn’t there, or an image is so widely circulated that its origin becomes secondary to everything it has come to represent.

Fusing painting, sculpture, installation, works on paper, and film, McCormick equally allows personal experience to exist alongside images whether encountered secondhand, inherited from others, or absorbed through the culture around us.

Eventually, these images begin to occupy the same landscape as lived experience. The distinction between something remembered, inherited, witnessed, or imagined becomes increasingly difficult to locate. While a central thread through McCormick’s work for over a decade, here, the very process of transmission itself moves to the forefront.

From the creation of an image to its reception, there exists an undeniable distance at once elastic and idiosyncratic. The works in Long Distance Call arise from what happens within that intermediary space of transmission. Images separated by generations, histories, and degrees of experience meet again under different circumstances. Looking to these newly formed encounters, McCormick’s exhibition is concerned less with recovering the original meaning of an image, than with understanding what it has become by the time it reaches us.