MATTE Editions is pleased to announce issue 50 of MATTE to accompany the exhibition Marley Trigg Stewart: The Hills Keep Burning in California, curated by Pacifico Silano from July 8 - 31, 2022 at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York.

Featuring photographs by Marley Trigg Stewart and a conversation with David Campany, the issue explores the notions of landscape and legacy through the examination of the photographer’s relationships to the men in his immediate family, particularly his father and uncle.

“With these photographs, Trigg Stewart has articulated a queer, Black poetics that prioritizes unflinching intimacy, agency, and an interest in expanding the graphic possibilities of the photographic image. He sees some of the images in this exhibition as depicting “pastoral images of a sort.” Thus we see a vista of the Arroyo Seco in Altadena, near to where Trigg Stewart grew up in Southern California. This region inspired the Arroyo Seco school of plein air painting, which included proponents of California Impressionism. Trigg Stewart contrasts this image with another kind of landscape, the cemetery in the Presidio Park in San Francisco, where his uncle, who briefly served in the Navy, is buried among seemingly endless rows of veterans. He intersperses these images with self-portraits, and photographs of his father and brother, inducing the viewer into a hallucinatory walk through time and terrain.” - Miguel Gutierrez

Marley Trigg Stewart (b. 1993) is an artist from Pasadena, California, whose practice explores the notion of authorship in photography through personal histories. In 2020, Trigg Stewart was awarded the Made in NYC Photography Fellowship. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

David Campany is a curator, writer, Curator at Large at the International Center of Photography, New York. His books include On Photographs (2020), A Handful of Dust (2015), Art and Photography (2003), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (2011), Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (2014), and Photography and Cinema (2008). He is the curator of William Klein: YES; Photographs, Paintings, Films, 1948–2013.