Matt Belge

Light, consciousness, and spiritual energy are not separate things. They are different states of the same underlying reality, the way water, steam, and ice are all expressions of the same essence..

I work in light because light is the state I can see and shape. But the work reaches for all three.

For forty years I've made installations and photographs that use light as an opening. Not as subject matter, but as the place where the immensity of the universe and the intimacy of our inner lives briefly become the same thing. The philosopher Gaston Bachelard called this intimate immensity: that feeling at the edge of the ocean or the top of a mountain, when the scale of the world and the depth of your interior life are experienced as a single, continuous plane. I try to create that condition deliberately, in spaces where it's unexpected.

I stand in a lineage of artists and thinkers for whom light carries more than photons. Thoreau and Emerson tracked something in the natural world that exceeded naturalism. James Turrell's installations are, at their core, the Quaker practice of sitting in silence, waiting for light to do something to consciousness. My most important teacher, Lowry Burgess, made work under oceans, on mountaintops, in deserts, and in orbit, treating the entire earth as a single canvas threaded by invisible energetic currents. His permanent installation at the deCordova Museum, here in Lincoln, Massachusetts where I live and work, remains a touchstone.

My studio practice centers on focus-stacked botanical photography. By combining multiple exposures, I render flowers with a presence that exceeds ordinary photography, as if the object itself, rather than a representation of it, has arrived in the room. These images are then video-projected at large scale onto architectural surfaces at night: weathered barn walls, ancient stone, living trees. The projector throws light only where the flower exists, so the image floats without containment, luminous and present, in conversation with every texture that reflects it.

My work has been shown at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria; MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies; and First Night Boston, among other venues. A recent installation, Sky Garden, was created for Rest Stop Ranch, a fully accessible garden in Topsfield, Massachusetts serving wheelchair users and their caregivers. Using multiple projectors, we cast large botanical images onto trees forty feet high to create an immersive visual field, accompanied by a spatial soundtrack of bells, resonating quartz bowls, and crickets played at barely audible volume. All of this during winter, when no flowers grow in the garden. Viewers who found the right angle saw a diffuse blur of light suddenly resolve into flowers. They went quiet. That silence is what the work is for.

My path here has been anything but straight. I entered art school at twenty-six after an early career in electrical engineering, later spent years as a UX designer, and eventually found my way back. Every pivot traces to the same source: a signal I've learned not to question. I follow it in the studio the same way I follow it everywhere else. I don't always know what I'm making until it's made.

Light arrives before we are ready for it. That is what I make work about..

Lincoln, Massachusetts USA