Matthew Brandt

The son of a successful commercial photographer, Matthew Brandt rebelled by pursuing painting as an undergraduate at Cooper Union. Later, he merged painting, silk screen, photography and papermaking while getting his M.F.A. at UCLA, creating pieces that mixed analog and digital photography. Now, just four years out of school and his work already in the collections of major Los Angeles museums, Brandt makes his NYC solo debut, with several series exploring nature photography in innovative ways.

The show starts with six massive prints from “Honeybees,” each a composite photo of dead insects collected from California beekeepers. The creatures themselves were ground up to make the pigment used for these prints, made with the 19th-century gum-bichromate process. The images were also embellished with real bee parts, surreally merging material and subject. “Trees” does likewise, capturing 50 different specimens from Houston’s George Bush Park. Both the handmade pulp paper and charcoal ink used to create the prints were meticulously made out of branches collected around the portrayed trees.

The biggest photos in the exhibition—and the ones most identified with the artist—are from his “Lakes and Reservoirs” series, which feature the eponymous bodies, pictorially abstracted and almost painterly thanks to the fact that the images were plunged into their waters. Using methods both ancient and new, Brandt sets photography on a fresh and exciting path.—Paul Laster