Rob Matthews | Peace Like a Fever

“Thematically, the work is a response to the growing number of people affected by forced migration,” Matthews says. “The work is not a journalistic or illustrative account of these events but an internalized response to them. Visually the work is a melding of approaches, in some way tapping into the collision of various Mediterranean cultures. Destruction and martyrdom are touched on but so is hope, as the title of the show would suggest.”
The first piece made for the show, The End of Time, features two figures, one holding sheet music and the other playing a clarinet, standing on a coastline with reddened water behind them. This composition is a partner to Auto Auto Harp Harp, in which two sirens on the shore of the sea stand on either side of a tree stump. The cloud in this piece is modified from The End of Time, as if viewed from the other side of the water and away from the destruction and sadness.

Matthews lives and works in Nashville, TN. He received his MFA in painting and printmaking from the Virginia Commonwealth University and his BFA in painting from the Univesrity of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is was awarded the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in 2004 and 2008, as well as the Pew Fellowship in the Arts Award in 2009. His work is held in the public collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the de Young Museum in San Francisco.