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Matthew Brandt's
January Sky -
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Drawing on the medium’s early, alchemical beginnings, Matthew Brandt frequently develops his photographs using materials gathered from the places they represent, such as lake water, dust, 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.”
The works in January Sky capture the Los Angeles sky during the fierce wildfires of January 2025 — scenes of sublime beauty resulting from the airborne smoke and ash. Pigments from inkjet prints are transferred onto wet plaster slabs in a contemporary echo of the fresco process, the surfaces cracking and fissuring as they dry, embedding the image within the material’s own fragile surface.
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When the fires broke out, Brandt was already working with this process and material in a series of work depicting the sprawling freeways around his hometown. January Sky emerged intuitively, as he turned his attention skyward. “I wasn't trying to make a series of works,” the artist explains. “I felt compelled to look up and photograph the skies, and I ended up with a whole slew of pictures of the very different, dramatic looking skies from that month.”
The plaster and fresco process continues Brandt’s sustained inquiry into the mutable boundaries between image and matter, exploring how photography’s physical and chemical foundations can mirror the social, environmental, and political realities of the world they depict. Fragmented and decontextualized, Brandt’s scenes of Los Angeles, represented through billowing clouds and saturated colors, recall at once heavenly frescoes from the Renaissance, ancient relics from an unknown site, and the endless scroll of disaster on our screens.
As the critic Çisemnaz Çil writes, “Fresco has always promised permanence; here it records un-permanence. The skies are tender and catastrophic at once: veils of tone suspended over brittle geology. The works slow the spectacle of wildfire into a durational surface, asking us to read climate not as breaking news but as material condition.” Suspended between solidity and dissolution, January Sky evokes both the physical vulnerability of the landscape and the enduring beauty found within catastrophe. -
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Matthew Brandt: From the Ashes On view through 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... -
Learn more about Matthew Brandt
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Credits: Installation image by Robert Divers Herrick; artist portrait by Chloe Trigano
