I’m grateful to have had this thoughtful discussion with Matthew Shelley, who has been stewarding this series of artist interviews at Volume Talks since he founded it in 2010. Matthew was generous with this conversation which touches on some themes in my current work after asking me to speak about my background growing up, my college experience at Sewanee, and my MFA experience in Savlador, Brazil.
Keep an eye out for his forthcoming print release of a book celebrating this ongoing series of interviews in 2027!
Excerpt below….
MS: Moving toward your more recent work, landscape seems to run through much of what you do. You were making abstract paintings as an undergraduate, and I assume that continued in graduate school. Was that work already shaped by land and environment, or did those concerns emerge later?
JM: Strangely, I'm just now re-engaging with landscape, and I’m picking up on something I left off on when I finished graduate school. I think depending on how you understand what landscape can encompass, I've had those inclinations running through me in different ways throughout my career.
The paintings that I made in school were definitely engaging in abstract landscapes, but in a much more minimalist way. I was using collage and different materials as a way to kind of build up a surface that could be wandered into. I was really influenced by like Chinese landscape and those panoramic compositions.
I wasn’t invested in ecology or other sort of themes of landscape, but I still considered landscape in my work. And then I really took a different turn. Over the last 15 years I was hyper-invested in the logic and process of collage. I was really interested in how to push the language of collage and push the materialities of collage. I wanted to get beyond the usual found image method and look at different ways of cutting and gluing it down material. That led me down various rabbit holes. Around 2015, I started making work using scanners as a way of developing my own source materials.
I would convert my studio into a photo studio for months at a time, and shoot subjects in a very open ended way. I would gather and construct different objects, and I was thinking a lot about camouflage and hallucination. If you’re thinking about camouflage and hallucination, you're imagining that as situated within a landscape. I was obsessed with thinking about how our brains and how our perceptual faculties process information of our environment to find patterns. This is what camouflage and hallucination is all about. I was very interested the way this was approached in the early 20th century.
If you look back at early modern collage there was this painter Abbott Thayer. He was a landscape painter. Camouflage as an idea emerged in landscape. It was used for landscape purposes in war.
Recently, I started to think about still life again. For years I was like, I don't give a shit about traditional genres like still life, portrait, or landscape. Those are such restrictive terms. But more recently I find them really productive.
I started looking back at still life and realizing just how strange and abstract it all is. Even if you're looking at a really old classical still life that is hyper-realistic, it's like the way that that artist assembled those objects together is itself this strange assemblage of abstraction.
If you take it further to Cubism and Morandi the sense of abstraction obviously becomes very pronounced. Where there's a sense huddling some objects together in an almost arbitrarily way. Then there’s this disruption of space and on top o that they are rendered in collage.
I was really invested in that way of working
You know, in a weird way you kind of get a merger of portrait and still life that way. It's like they both have a kind of a central pile of either human form or still life objects. And then there's like negative space around it.
In the last few years I started looking at this particular Dutch tradition of still life called sottobosco. It means on the forest floor. They are still life paintings situated within a landscape. You could also say that they are landscapes in the format and the scale of a still life.
MS: This is one of the things that really caught my interest. You shared some videos on Instagram that explain this. Like yourself, I don’t have a desire to learn to paint according to any classical tradition. However, the classical genres of landscape and still life are still very relevant to my practice.
Just as you’re saying, the composition and formal tendencies of those genres can be very appealing to me. Looking at those paintings can encourage me to approach something from a different angle. So I understand how a person can make things inspired by those traditions, but without seeking to emulate them.
Landscape is a difficult thing to talk about in contemporary art. If someone asks me what kind of work I make, I'm never entirely sure what to tell them. Because most of my work is about land and environment, but if I say that it sounds a little too conceptual. I'm not out there making land art or doing something relating to environmental issues.
Although, If I say that I work with landscape, a lot of people will assume that I mean in the vista sense, like scenery paintings. I have a hard time describing my work because it’s neither one of those things.
I like to use visual art as a way to situate myself in space. If I’m in a place, and there’s a quiet moment to reflect on where I am, my impulse is to use something visual to describe that. I like to think about the scale of the things that surround me. I like to think about my perception and the spatial distortion that goes on there. In that sense, my work is connected to landscape, but isn’t really a part of that genre.
I can relate to your interest in the sottobosco tradition because it deals with landscape at an unusual scale. It’s a still life arrangement on the forrest floor. That’s pretty great.
A couple of years ago I organized a show called Ground Level. It featured artwork from 5 different artists who deal with landscape at close range. The show focused on what the textures and details say about different places. It was about how close range sensations say more about a places than a vista. I thought about that show when I saw your videos on sottobosco.
JM: I posted another video describing specifically how I fell into it. I’ve been making this series of scanner collages since 2015. I call the series Phenotypes because I was looking for a term that could describe a sense of mutability. I think about genetics as an allegory for image mutation. It seems a fitting way to describe how images can develop through variations and mutations. The series became a kind of feedback loop of image creation and an experimental space where I could bring together different interests.
For years, I was thinking about camouflage and hallucination. I was mostly photographing still-life compositions, arranging different objects and materials. A few years ago, I became interested in incorporating dragonflies into that work. I bought some toy dragonflies—the kind you stick in the ground on a wire—and started dipping them in paint, photographing them with different materials, and constructing these strange little dioramas.
That led me to research other image traditions involving dragonflies. I’ve been particularly obsessed with the Dutch still-life painter Willem van Aelst. His work is so abstract and strange. I kept wondering, what was this guy doing, piling things up in these particular ways? To me, he seemed like one of the most abstract painters of that time and place.
So I Googled whether Willem van Aelst had ever painted dragonflies, and sure enough, he had. Before that, I had mostly known his work through another strange subgenre: hunting-game still lifes, where you get these elaborate arrangements of dead game—a deer head, pheasants, and other objects all piled together.
I learned that he had dabbled in this genre called sottobosco, and his contemporary, Otto Marseus van Schrieck, was really the progenitor of the genre. Only a handful of artists in the mid- to late seventeenth century participated in it. It was never a particularly large genre.
If you look at vanitas still lifes—lobsters, flowers, oysters, grapes—hundreds of artists were making those paintings. There was enormous demand for them. Apparently, there wasn’t much demand for the subgenera of sottobosco.
When I stumbled onto these paintings, and specifically van Schrieck’s work, I started comparing them to the scanner collages I was making with dragonflies. I realized, Oh, the work I’m already making has a preexisting genre. It was a strange and somewhat arbitrary realization: this obscure Dutch still-life tradition could become a container for describing work I had already made.
MS: That close attention to the forest floor really appeals to me. The smaller textures and easily overlooked details often shape my experience of a place more than a distant vista does. I’m also interested in how these paintings use natural forms to construct allegories while shifting the scale through which we view the landscape.
I love running those older traditions through a contemporary lens because, as you’re saying, all painting is fundamentally abstract. There can be incredibly appealing shapes and negative spaces in older works that I want to extract and incorporate into my own work. Because I work a lot with collage, that approach fueled my practice for a long time—pulling small moments from older paintings and placing them into new contexts within my own work.
JM: I’ve done a fair amount of that in past work, and it’s one of the moves I’m trying to make in this body of work while balancing it with more open-ended explorations.
But going back to what you said about scale, I was at the show the other day doing a walkthrough, and as I was describing the work to someone, I instinctively hunched down toward the floor to illustrate the vantage point. To your point, it’s not a vista, although occasionally there might be a hint of one in the background. But even then, you’re viewing the scene from close to the ground, which isn’t how we typically experience a vista.
You’re looking at what’s immediately in front of you first. There might be a sublime sky far off in the distance, but your attention is focused on the insects and plants at your feet. What I love about that perspective is the sense of different species converging on the same place at the same time.
In one sense, you could say these paintings are ecologically accurate. The species depicted generally would have occupied the same environments. Van Schrieck even maintained something like an ecological preserve, with a pond where he could study plants and animals. But the paintings can look strangely artificial because everything is happening at once. There’s a snake wrestling something away from a frog, insects everywhere—it’s as if every creature that could possibly inhabit that environment has appeared at the same moment.
What fascinates me is that this artificial compression expresses something deeply true about ecology: there’s always more going on than we realize. There’s an amazing book called The Forest Unseen by David Haskell, a former professor at Sewanee. He spent a year observing a small area of forest floor near Sewanee called Shakerag Hollow, which I’m actually making a painting of right now. He returned to the same place throughout the year, documenting the different species he encountered and the biological processes unfolding there, even in the coldest part of winter.
The book describes this staggering multiplicity of life happening beneath and around us all the time. If you look closely enough, there are countless overlapping processes and realities occurring within even a small patch of forest. These paintings render that idea in a strange way. They may look artificial, but they capture something true about the density and complexity of an ecosystem.
That’s also why the traditional vanitas interpretation has always fallen short for me. Vanitas paintings often carry a Christian moralism about the fleeting nature of earthly life and the danger of becoming attached to worldly things. These paintings feel almost more Buddhist to me, perhaps unintentionally. I see a swirl of life, death, and transformation—something much more cyclical. There’s a snake eating an insect and flowers dying, but there are also mushrooms emerging from the ground and other forms bursting with life. Death and regeneration are happening simultaneously.
