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Matthew Brandt:
From the AshesNovember 8, 2025 - January 10, 2026
Haines Gallery is pleased to present From the Ashes, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Los Angeles–based experimental photographer Matthew Brandt (b. 1982), known for his inventive, materially driven processes that merge subject and substance. From the Ashes brings together five interrelated bodies of work, including Dust, January Skies, Florida Strangler, Eagles, and Wai‘anae — each defined by the artist’s characteristic fusion of conceptual rigor and material experimentation. Taken together, these series explore how photography’s physical and chemical foundations can mirror social, environmental, and political realities.
Drawing on the medium’s early, alchemical beginnings, Brandt frequently develops his photographs using materials gathered from the places they represent, such as lake water and dirt. “Most of what I do,” Brandt explains, “stems from the relationship between the photographic subject and its representational material. Each methodology has its own baggage to carry, and that baggage becomes part of the work’s meaning.” Through this approach, Brandt extends photography’s indexical function — its capacity to be of something as much as about it — transforming images into tangible traces of what they depict.
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With his Dust series, Brandt revisits archival photographs of buildings erected near Fort Mason for the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition, as well as the former immigration barracks on Angel Island — monumental sites seen in shocking states of destruction. Using dust collected from their present-day locations, the artist created gum bichromate prints, a 19th-century photographic process combining gum arabic, dichromate, and watercolor pigment. These images, at once luminous and decaying, ask viewers to consider San Francisco’s complicated history of progress and erasure, aspiration and exclusion. A related piece depicts a fallen replica of Michelangelo’s David from the Forest Lawn Museum in Glendale, CA, printed using marble dust from the statue itself.
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In January Skies (2025), Brandt pays homage to his hometown with a series that captures the city’s smoke-tinged skies during the wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles in January 2025. Pigments from inkjet prints are transferred onto wet plaster applied to cement panels, the surfaces cracking and fissuring as they dry. The resulting fresco-like images — fragments suspended between solidity and dissolution — evoke both the physical vulnerability of the landscape and the enduring beauty found within catastrophe.
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Matthew Brandt
January Sky XXXXV, 2025
Pigment and plaster on cement board
18.75 x 61 inches, framed
$20,000
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In his series Wai‘anae (2015), named for the Oahu town in which the works were made, photographs of the Hawaiian landscape bear physical markings from the land itself. Chromogenic prints of Oahu’s dense forests were rolled in dirt, leaves, burlap, and lace, and buried in the local terrain, inviting nature's unpredictable intervention. Over time, earth and the elements altered the works, eroding the pictures’ surfaces in some areas and superimposing new patterns onto others.Florida Strangler (2022-23) depicts the native ficus aurea — trees that begin life high in another tree’s canopy and grow downward, ultimately enveloping and “strangling” the host with their roots. Using a process akin to carbon printing, Brandt renders these tangled forms with using industrial synthetics manufactured by DuPont, the same corporation long associated with “forever chemicals” used in everything from vehicles to building materials and athletic clothing. The pairing of ecological imagery and petrochemicals underscores the entanglement of nature and industry, parasitism and survival.
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Matthew Brandt
Eagles 1-50, 2017-201950 Daguerreotypes made from American Silver Eagle coins and glass10 x 8 x 1 inches, each$90,000
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Eagles (2017-19) is a series of daguerreotypes depicting American bald eagles fighting over salmon, photographed during Alaska’s annual Bald Eagle Festival. Initially undertaken as a foray into wildlife photography, the project evolved into a pointed reflection on American symbolism. Each image is made on a silver plate cast from melted-down American Silver Eagle coins, merging subject and medium in a potent metaphor for competition, consumption, and the circulation of power. Completed more than five years ago, the series feels no less relevant to our current political landscape.
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