Matthew Oxley

De Rode Tetter

12 lines of Tetterode’s ’Nobel’ letterpressed on tape in their type specimen book. After being a typefoundry, the building found itself at the center of the 1980’s squatting movement of Amsterdam. Elaborating on the history of this typefoundry, Matthew letterpressed a poem which sets the scene of the squatted Tetterode 'De Rode Tetter’ with original type from the foundry. The poem is based on the archival image 2.24.01.05

Dear History,

As a response to the renaissance attitude towards the documentation of landscapes as being in service to rationality and ‘discovery’, Matthew overprinted a pair of 19th century colonial atlases. The overprint consists out of 2 sets of poems, also concerning landscapes, written by the postcolonial thinker Edouard Glissant. The presentation of the lasercut atlases is based on the marbling of paper, which Matthew found as material similitude to the unpredictable outcome of merging cultures.

Family Album

Sorting through the large archive of analog strips of the family album, Matthew found several damaged films. He decided to enlarge these images to A0 formats, emphasizing the new lightings and stories of the damage. Reversing this process, Matthew reproduced one of his brother’s favorite (lost) images on a series of envelopes with silver and black ink, clogging the picture as the series progresses.

Public Gardening Daalwijk

3 embroidered maps, paired with photocopies on marbled paper of growing flower bulbs. Accompanying them, are highlighted photocopies of Vilém Flusser’s ‘The Gesture of Planting’ printed on seeded paper. Enacting ‘The Gesture of Planting’, the works are a result of reflections from a 30-day period of planting flowers in front of the Daalwijk flat on municipality ground. Key to these reflections are principals of waiting and adaptation.

Top o/t Morning

23 blue photocopies breaking down the gesture of dressing, and a set of enlarged newspaper cutouts. The newspaper cutouts are part of an ongoing archive of old newspapers, which Matthew collects. In this series, he emphasizes ‘yesterday’s news’ by enlarging its snippets, effectively breaking the news cycle. Accompanying the enlargements is a long line of zoomed-in monochromatic photocopies of hands dressing up in the morning.