“These paintings and drawings are meditations on the footprint humans leave on the environment through technologies and industry. I reimagine the urban landscape as a constructed, yet natural entity, using my own photography and satellite images for reference. I want to subvert traditional landscape imagery by exploring the invasive nature of our species.

Matthew Cramer was born and raised near Cleveland Ohio, after graduating from Ohio University he went on to New York for graduate school at Pratt Institute. In the early 2000s he moved to Los Angeles and set up his current garage studio shortly after moving to Burbank with his wife and teenage son in 2017. He has been making art and music consistently for a long time. In addition, he is a graphic design teacher at Camino Nuevo, a downtown charter high school.

He uses the self-portrait as a reoccurring motif and it has been an ongoing idea in varying intensity, along with many other themes and explorations. Cramer’s self-portraits have taken on many different forms: sometimes more traditional theatrical paintings, collages, and drawings, or leaning more into abstraction. The self-portraits are a meditative, almost ritualistic part of artmaking for him, like looking in the mirror each day. Cramer envisions this exhibit with the viewer walking from mirror to mirror, painting to painting and directly confronting a fellow human and the fleeting thoughts of the psyche.”