Matt Lipps
By cutting them out and mounting them on cardboard, these lovely, vanished beings could once again stand up and be counted – a “magical, miniature resurrection” shared with the artist for a brief moment before being returned to what Roland Barthes (Lipp’s guiding spirit) has called the “flat death”.
Lipps’ dream-like Home series also deals with the past and another kind of yearning: the call of the wild.
Father-figure Ansel Adams makes his appearance on this stage in the form of his Yosemite pictures, fragments of which float like clouds through mundane but reassuring domestic interiors – the maternal domain.
Adams is also to be credited for inspiring Lipps’ Horizon series: it was his famous Storeroom, de Young Museum, San Francisco, 1933, showing a jumbled basement of classical sculpture, that inspired Lipps to invite his own cut-out heroes of the past on stage for a curtain call.
Giving the deceased a second life is a fundamental aim of Matt Lipps, who has always felt profoundly affected by the premature deaths of legions of gay men at the peak of the AIDS crisis. As a teenager he had felt a deep longing for the beautiful faces and bodies he saw in magazines and posters, and these glossy idols would become the primary vehicle for his art.
ext by William A Ewing
