FINE ARTS
Work from art galleries, installations, broadcasts, residencies, and performances. Studio arts, multimedia works, and more.
YES! I am accepting offers to show work in galleries, group shows, installations, and more.
Contact here for fine arts inquiries:
hello @ matthewjsage .com
Tender / Wading : Album and
Music Video Suite (2025)
Three music videos that operate through an intermedia poetics to speak to this album’s considerations of home, nature, landscape, slowness, and stubborn optimism.
Found slide projections, object semantics and junk sculpture, code poetry, light and pixels.
Made in support of the album “Tender / Wading” out September 26th on RVNG intl.
Winter Writer in Residence:
Wolverine Farm Publick House (2025)
Writing and collecting poems, essays, and more, performing readings, and other real life adventures in writing happening at the esteemed Wolverine Farm Publick House January - March of 2025.
Below is a collection of some hand-rendered broadsides that have accumulated so far during this residency.
Fragments from journals and day books hand-stenciled onto repurposed papers.
The full gallery and select drawingpoems are available for purchase HERE.
Decomposer
Directions Gallery at Colorado State University (2024)
A solo-installation in the Directions Gallery at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, October 2024.
WALL TEXT:
“Behold this compost, behold it well… It grows such sweet things from such corruptions.”
In his poem “This Compost” Walt Whitman reflects on the earth’s slowness, its patience, and how it can consistently consume and decompose what is presented to it, turning that rot and morass into tender berries, lush grass, felt later gently tickling his naked body and coating his tongue. A study of our planet, a marvel, and its amorous engine of transforming decay into pleasure. What a place to make a home!
DECOMPOSER is an installation and multichannel composition for several assemblages. A constellation of humor, garbage, didactics, cut grass, paint chips, and new media. A scraping for nutrients through manipulating decaying materials; composing a domestic quandary while things are seemingly rotting. A toast to drinking in sour fecundity and stubborn joy when dwelling with this late-stage tremulation.
Prepositions
Wolverine Farm Publick House (2023)
Wolverine Farm Publick House - Fort Collins, Colorado
Drawings + sculpture + sound
An intermedia installation at Wolverine Farm Publick House in Fort Collins, Colorado. September 2023. Featuring an array of work including drawing, sculpture, and sound. Reapplications of various materials exploring and troubling the spaces between the human-made domestic and the natural/nonhuman. An exploration of proximities generating meaning and identity.
Choir (in collaboration w/ Pope.L)
The Whitney Museum, NYC (2019)
Pope.L is an artist whose work explores race, identity, class, performance, text, and everything in between those aforementioned containers. On CHOIR he created an installation at The Whitney; a public fountain holding nearly 1,000 gallons of water that filled and drained through copper pipes and a water fountain. I was asked to collaborate with Pope.L on this installation by creating sound design and microphone implementation to amplify the auditory elements of this installation. Using foley techniques, cardioid and contact microphones, pop filters, archival sound sources, and three channel audio, I created an enveloping soundscape to accompany this physical installation. In addition to the installation in the gallery space, sound design was implemented in the lobby of The Whitney, a playful and equally dreadful dripping sound that appears and disappears in intervals, to signal the presence of Pope.L's works in the museum.
From the New York Times: At the Whitney, his room-size “Choir” features an industrial water tank installed in a darkened space and eerie sound elements created by contact microphones placed near the pipes leading to the tank. Pope.L does this to show how even “neutral” or natural elements like water get embroiled in social and political battles, from Jim Crow laws that prohibited African-Americans from using certain water fountains to the recent water-contamination crisis in Flint, Mich.
From an essay by Christopher Lew, curator at the Whitney: Physically, Choir is centered on an absence. After walking through a corridor formed by black mesh fabric and turning a corner, the viewer is hit with a bright light, illuminating from behind a milky white 1,000-gallon tank that sits high on a platform. The tank is weighty and marred by use, as much a void as a container. Haloed by the gallery lights, it achieves a certain monumentality. Directly above the tank, an old drinking fountain is suspended upside down from the ceiling. The fountain gushes at a volume and rate that surpasses normal capacity, sending water straight down into the mouth of the tank below. As if it could fill—or overfill—the tank, the intensity of the flow is matched by the amplified sound of the cascade. It reverberates loudly within the gallery and into the Whitney’s lobby just beyond the doors. Buried in the sonic maelstrom are sounds of singing and shouting, voices that at first are indistinguishable from the rush of water but later grow in presence and volume. Then, as quickly as it began, the fountain stops, letting the water lap the sides of the tank, the waves visible through the semitranslucent plastic. A moment later, a pump kicks on—its mechanic whir also picked up by the microphones installed in the gallery—and the water drains from the tank through a network of copper pipes that run throughout the space. The cycle repeats like a delirious ritual revolving around the tank; there is a constant movement and flow, an alternating presence and absence of abundance. The tank is a void that is filled with a roar, only to be pumped out and replenished again in a Sisyphean act—not unlike Lucy’s futile attempt to stave off the flow of candies.
More information on this installation here.
What is the Big Idea?
Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2019)
Risograph prints, enamel figures, scavenger hunt pamphlet
An installation/scavenger hunt featuring risograph printed maps and micro-poems, enamel miniature figurines, and a wall drawing as a part of the group exhibition Beginning to See the Light curated by Ariel Gentalen at Hyde Park Art Center, February - July 2019.
Unmown Strip
Portage Park, Chicago (2019)
Native and invasive species, lawn mower, light and water, time
A time-based "land art gag" in my backyard, performed and documented Spring thru Summer 2019. Built around my lawnmower running out of gas halfway through a mowing, and eventually leading to considerations of habitat regeneration, invasive species dynamics, questioning the patriarchal legacy of Eurocentric horticultural practices, and a "mow-hawk" pun.
The central strip of my relatively groomed backyard was left unmowed for an entire season. Invasive species, namely creeping charley (Glechoma hederacea) overran the strip. Eventually a catalpa tree (Catalpa speciosa) sprouted and took root.
Digital Photography (2014 - 20??)
You can find select current photography on my substack or my instagram. Below are two little galleries of photographic studies from the last decade or so.
I am currently shooting on a Fujifilm x100s point and shoot.
I also shoot on a Nikon D5300 DSLR.
Impressionism.jpg 2014 - 2019
A series of street-photography style portraits of people taking pictures of paintings hung in the Impressionism Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago. Collected over several years, the above nine images frame the point and time, but do not include more than an impression.
Progress/Decay (aka offworldzones) 2014 - 2019
A series of street-photography style portraits of objects exerting their unique agencies around the Chicagoland metro area. Collected on long walks, the above nine images introduce some of the characters, but their friends and neighbors in the image archive far exceed this mattering.
©MMXXV :)
all text and images by matthew j sage
unless otherwise noted
unless otherwise noted