Conversation with Matthew Picton and Jill Hartz
Channel: Elizabeth Leach Gallery
Date: 18/07/2020

In this previously recorded video, gallery artist Matthew Picton and Jill Hartz, the former executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, discuss the artwork on view in the exhibition, "Eschatologies."

In "Eschatologies," Matthew Picton presents new three-dimensional framed paper sculptures that interweave historical and contemporary images from paintings, photographs, books and film. Eschatology is defined as a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world, and the plural version in the exhibition title proposes an ongoing multiplicity of narratives. In this series, Picton engages with themes of mortality, impermanence, destruction and oppression in societies past and present. The artist explores the cyclical nature of calamitous ideologies throughout human civilization and illuminates hidden truths within dominant cultural histories.

Born in London, England, Matthew Picton studied Politics and History at the London School of Economics (London, England). Picton now lives and works in Ashland, Oregon. His work is included in the collections the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum (San Francisco, CA), the Herbert Museum of Art (Coventry, UK), the Fidelity Bank collection (London, UK), the Stadt Museum (Dresden, Germany) and the New York University Langone Medical Center Collection (New York, NY). In 2020, he completed two large-scale commissions for Facebook (Seattle, WA) and Google (Redwood City, CA). 

Appointed executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon (Eugene, OR) in 2008, Jill Hartz retired in December 2019. She now lives in Ashland, Oregon, and is an independent curator with upcoming exhibitions at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, OR) and the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University (Ashland, OR). Hartz received her MA with Honors in English Language and Literature from the University of St. Andrews (St. Andrews, Scotland) in 1973 and pursued undergraduate studies at Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH). Hartz served as director of the University of Virginia Art Museum (Charlottesville, VA) from 1997 to 2008 and previously worked in various capacities at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY). She has organized numerous exhibitions, primarily in the contemporary art field, and is the editor of five books, including Rick Bartow: Things We Know But Cannot Explain (co-edited with Danielle Knapp, 2015) and Hindsight-Fore-Site: Art for the New Millennium (University of Virginia Press, 2003).