Artist
Exhibition Dates
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Matthew Brooks
The Telephone Salesman 2017
Photo courtesy of David C. Oberman
Matthew Brooks
The Telephone Salesman 2017
Aluminum lightbox with transmounted transparency
The Telephone Salesman
The Telephone Salesman (2017) presents the viewer with a surreal yet mundane tableau seemingly set in a dated living room. Entirely constructed in the studio from 1960–1970s furniture and objects, the work interrogates the viewer’s sense of the real as they are presented with an ambiguous, disorderly domestic space. Set in the early 1970s, The Telephone Salesman presents a melancholic scene in which a salesman has amassed a mysterious accumulation of rotary phones in his home. Drawing upon a range of references from the histories of photography and film, the image seduces the viewer with a cinematic, psychological portrait of an absent subject.
Capture Photography Festival and the City of New Westminster Public Art Program invited photographers to submit proposals for a public artwork that considers the theme of “traffic” and its different interpretations, from the physical sense of moving goods, people, and vehicles to the virtual exchange of information through digital services. The installations are sited across two locations in New Westminster.
Presented in partnership by
Capture Photography Festival and the City of New Westminster Public Art Program
