Abandoned Church Los Angeles CA A, 2018-2020. © Matthew Brandt

Inspired by natural imagery and the traditions of landscape picture-making and carbon printing, Matthew Brandt sets out to explore the intricacy of light in Carbon, Birch, Silver, Rooms at Yossi Milo Gallery. This is Brandt’s fourth exhibition with the gallery and showcases four distinct bodies of his new work across the gallery’s east and west viewing rooms.

“Light is a strange thing to hold,” says Brandt, “and this exhibition has something to do with this undertaking.”

In the selection of works comprising Birch, Brandt laser-engraves photographs of birch trees he took around St. Petersburg, Russia, into 71-inch by 41-inch pieces of birch plywood. In effect, birch stands as both the principal natural imagery of the work as well as the medium through which this imagery is conveyed. In other words, it beholds itself. Brandt then scorches the wood and applies gold leaf to it, transforming the otherwise singular idea of “birch” into a complex and dichotomous interplay between dark and light, blackened and gilded, natural and decorated.

*Lance’s Study*, 2021. 55 1/2" x 21" x 21" (141 x 53 x 53 cm). Photographic Glass Chandelier Pieces with Painted Metal Armature © Matthew Brandt

Silver is displayed alongside Birch in the east gallery in equal size and performs a similar study of light, albeit through reflective liquid silver doused onto black-and-white gelatin silver prints of forests. The more Brandt’s photographs of trees and landscape are interrupted by this fluid, the more reflective these objects become, and the more they metamorphose into mirrors in which the viewer sees themselves more clearly than whatever earthiness lurks within them.

Carbon was born from Brandt’s collection of burnt materials from sites devastated by California wildfires, and initially presents itself to the viewer as a series of unequivocally plain black canvases. Here, exploring the history of carbon printing, Brandt turns charred material into pigment and blackout fabric into paper to create black-on-black vegetal images, the details of which are only revealed through shifts in light and tonality. It’s interesting –– almost necessary, then –– that these cryptic Carbon works, these objects of blanketed blackness, are displayed alongside Brandt’s final body of work, Rooms.

Rooms consists of six reclaimed chandeliers that represent a “photographic record of the room [they] once occupied.” For each used chandelier sold to Brandt, the artist heat-fuses a part of a panoramic photograph of the room in which the chandelier once lived into each glass pendant, so that walking around the light fixture, the viewer sees the chandelier’s former home in a full 360 degrees. Named after the rooms from their past lives, like Lance’s Study and Marissa’s Bedroom, each chandelier holds a memory recalled by light.

This exhibition investigates what and how objects –– more relevantly, materials –– hold light. Upon entering the west gallery and finding these chandeliers hung alongside Brandt’s Carbon works, the viewer finds themselves caught in the middle of a very specific exchange: between an object that emits light, and another that absorbs it. By virtue of its functional property to radiate light and in this curation of the show, then, Rooms becomes the animator, if not the life source, of Carbon which might have otherwise fallen unrealised.

The most remarkable component of Carbon, Birch, Silver, Rooms therefore isn’t its visual spectacle. It’s Brandt’s attention to material interaction: to how liquid silver chemically interacts with a gelatin print to streak and stain the way that it does, to how light unearths the discoloured. It’s the artist’s repurposed, technical and experimental play with the materiality of things and his attention to the ways in which things react to each other, from which this visual spectacle subsequently emerges. This is what makes this exhibition truly remarkable.