Matthew Brandt: ‘From the Ashes’ on the Haines Gallery

The Haines Gallery presents Matthew Brandt: From the Ashes, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with the Los Angeles-based experimental photographer, is on view at Haines’ Building C gallery by Jan. 10, 2026. The exhibition brings collectively a number of our bodies of labor that always handle social and environmental issues.

Merging topic with substance

Known for his ingenious, materially pushed processes, Matthew Brandt merges topic with substance through fusing supplies gathered from the locations they symbolize with the ensuing {photograph}. His photos are steadily developed with water and dust related along with his topic places. “Most of what I do,” Brandt explains, “stems from the relationship between the photographic subject and its representational material. Each methodology has its own baggage to carry, and that baggage becomes part of the work’s meaning.” Moving past images as a documentarian utility, the ensuing photos comprise tangible traces of what they painting.

Brandt’s course of is labor-intensive, drawing on the alchemical beginnings of images. Conceptual rigor and materials experimentation come collectively to create artwork that always addresses social and environmental issues. In his January Skies collection (2025), Brandt pays homage to his hometown with a collection capturing the roiling smoke and ochre-tinged skies in the course of the wildfires that devastated components of Los Angeles in January 2025. The pigments, within the type of inkjet prints, are transferred onto moist plaster after which utilized to cement panels, which crack and fissure as they dry. The accomplished pictures are fresco-like, presenting the imagery like an archaeological document discovered after a disaster.  

Using a course of akin to carbon printing, Brandt used industrial synthetics manufactured by DuPont — the identical company lengthy related to “forever chemicals” utilized in the whole lot from automobiles to constructing supplies — to print pictures of timber. Florida Strangler (2022–23) from Brandt’s Carbon collection options the native Ficus aurea. This strangler fig tree begins life excessive in one other tree’s cover and grows downward, in the end enveloping and “strangling” the host with its roots. Pairing the picture of the sinister, twisted fig tree branches with petrochemicals underscores the relationships amongst nature and trade, parasitism, and survival.   

The Eagles collection (2017–19) includes a grid of fifty daguerreotypes of bald eagles preventing over salmon. The photos, captured throughout Alaska’s annual Bald Eagle Festival, started as a foray into wildlife images however advanced right into a pointed reflection on American symbolism. “All I was witnessing,” Brandt recollects, “was eagles stealing from each other — a constant battle for salmon.” In a metaphor for competitors, consumption, and energy, Brandt designed every picture on a silver plate forged from melted-down American Silver Eagle cash. The composition of those diving, swooping birds of talons reaching out in dominance to seize their meal stays a related illustration of this nation’s ongoing sociopolitical tensions.

Some newly created works from Brandt’s ongoing Dust collection are additionally on show. These photos reanimate archival photos of now-demolished buildings that when stood close to the Haines Gallery Fort Mason location — the non permanent palaces of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and the previous immigration and detention buildings on Angel Island — all printed with mud collected from their present-day websites. Panama Pacific International Fair (2025), a gum bichromate print on paper, with mud swept from a residential stairwell, reveals the stays of the grand however non permanent 1915 construction. Angel Island (2025) reveals these buildings on fireplace. This print can be made with mud swept from the island itself, particularly Ayala Cove’s north ridge path stairway. The Dust photos make us query progress, decay, and what in our society is in the end topic to erasure and exclusion.

Nature’s intervention and its unpredictable outcomes drive the narrative behind Brandt’s collection Wai‘anae (2015). Named after the Oahu town in which the works were created, the chromogenic prints of Oahu’s dense forests have been rolled in dust, leaves, burlap, and lace, and buried within the native terrain. Part picture and half archaeology, the soil’s parts altered the works by erosion. Erosion and the weather act as change brokers, superimposing new patterns on the ultimate consequence. Wai‘anae echoes Hawaiian funerary customs by which the enshrouded physique is returned to the bottom.

Brandt’s From the Ashes explores the boundaries amongst picture and matter, tradition and atmosphere, creation, and entropy. The detritus of our former monuments, the haze of wildfire skies, and the corrosion of prints comprised of mud and dust — and the gleam of recast silver — tells the viewer a narrative. The photos are signposts telling us the place we’ve got been, and the place we’re going, in a collision of time, place, and chemistry.

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