JOHN MATTURRI
John Matturri is a Newark born New York-based artist/photographer who has for the past several years maintained a studio in Newark. Matturri studied photography with Lisette Model and Ken Heyman and has benefitted from working associations with artists such as Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, Richard Foreman, John Zorn, Stuart Sherman, Michael Kirby, Ying Liu, and Shelley Hirsch.
Matturri’s work has always been centered on an ongoing practice of photographing urban environments. In addition to the presentation of individual images, his interest in film and improvised music has also contributed to a focus interactions between images and between images and words. Beginning in the early 1980s, this work consisted of improvised slide projections, often performed with musicians, followed by a series of image-text arrangements and installations. Starting in 2007, through a series of extended Emily Harvey Foundation Venice residencies, he has built up extensive archives of photographs of that city and, later, of Paris and Berlin and these have served as a primary basis for his work over the past decade. Recently, he has been re-visting a small archive of photographs taken in Newark between 1969 and 1974. This work has included room-sized image-text installations, arrangements of multiple images, digital slideshows, book works, Instagram streams, and online presentations of entire archives, as well as individual prints.
His work has been seen at the Brooklyn Historical Society Museum, the Downtown branch of the Whitney Museum, Newark Public Library, Collective for Living Cinema, Millennium Film Workshop, Akwaaba Gallery, Art & Artifacts of Newark, The Phatory, June Bateman Fine Arts, Emily Harvey Foundation in New York and Venice, and Kunsttempel Kassell, among other venues. He was a co-curator and catalog editor of Beginningless Thought / Endless Seeing, an NYU retrospective of the work of Stuart Sherman and more recently organized at Emily Harvey Foundation George/Jerzy Gajek aka Tripod/t Depot, a presentation of the work of a remarkable but little known experimental writer. Matturri has written on visual art, film, performance, and philosophy.
Along the way, he undertook graduate work in Philosophy and Cinema Studies and for many years taught these subjects at Queens College and other institutions.
