Matthew Bamber: Dream Home at HOME
Maja Lorkowska, Exhibitions Editor
Matthew Bamber is the current guest in HOME’s Granada Foundation Galleries with his show Dream Home, a multilayered exploration of queerness, domesticity and power.
Bamber works predominantly in photography and collage, creating new digital imagery from existing visuals and thus making a comment on the oversaturation of images in today’s world.
It could be said that collage is often an overlooked medium currently going through something of a renaissance, at the very least in terms of its representation. A lot more widely used than we may think, it accompanies painters, sculptors, filmmakers and many other artists along the creative process. Bamber, on the other hand, uses it as his leading visual language, creating brand new complex images from recognisable elements. The artist himself describes them as “deconstructed, overloaded compositions” created from blends of imagery “that are broken down and built back up”, so the process appears as important as the final result. The images are difficult to categorise, ranging from minimalist and monochrome to intricate patterns with repetition of motifs and colours that somehow clash in harmony.
Dream Home takes a closer look at the idea of ‘queer domesticity’, using Bamber’s home as a starting point and a site of identity construction. The Dream Home series consists of six pieces, each focusing on a different area of the artist’s home, opening up questions about privacy and the works being for public viewing, as well as personal histories and memory.
The GM series is a result of Bamber’s extensive research into queer theories and personal experiences. The resulting work is an attempt to process the overwhelmingly large amounts of information available to consume and understand, all around the LGBTQIA+ community. Here, each artwork relates to a different issue such as ‘outness’, family and surveillance.
The exhibition oscillates between a deep dive into the artist’s mind and the chaos of external ‘stuff’ – objects from the home, information to digest and the constantly changing nature of it all. As the show is quite compact in size, make sure you spend time with each individual piece.
