HARTFORD, CONN.- Photographer Talia Chetrit presents recent work alongside images from her personal archive in her first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Chetrit’s work is the 193rd in the nearly 50-year-old MATRIX series at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Talia Chetrit / MATRIX 193 will be on view until January 7, 2024.

In an age of image excess, Talia Chetrit uses analog photography to probe the relationship between photographer, camera, and subject. She includes family, friends, and even her equipment in investigations which emphasize the connection between performance and image-making. Shooting on film and using no post-production, Chetrit embraces cropping and graininess in her compositions which span formats and genres including portraiture, self-portraiture, still-life, editorial, and street photography.

Chetrit’s often-charged images challenge viewers to self-reflect upon reactions and preconceptions and consider photography’s role in private and public milieus. In this exhibition, an ambiguous sequence of photographs presented in a sentence-like arrangement includes uncanny still-lifes, portraits, nude bodies in part or entirety, and family photos. Together the works draw out unexpected formal and narrative connections inviting the viewer in and asking them to work.

“This interpretive slipperiness is at the crux of Chetrit’s work, and she embraces the discomfort it sometimes causes viewers accustomed to reading images at face value,” said Jared Quinton, Emily Hall Tremaine Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth. “By encouraging us to sit with and reflect on this discomfort, Chetrit offers a profound model for critical engagement with not only her own photographs, but all the images with which our contemporary world is overflowing.”

The artist delivered an opening night talk at the Wadsworth on Thursday, October 5 in conversation with poet, author, and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir.

To accompany her MATRIX presentation, Chetrit selected a video work to screen at the Wadsworth throughout the run of the exhibition. Barbara DeGenevieve’s Desperado (2004–06) is a pseudo-documentary that follows the artist’s affair with a truck driver, dealing directly and self-referentially with issues of class, gender, and sex. As the longtime chair of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, DeGenevieve was influential to Chetrit who earned her BFA from the program in 2004.

Since its inception in 1975, MATRIX has been a forum for celebrating cutting-edge art and artists at the Wadsworth. The first exhibition series of its kind, the Wadsworth's MATRIX program has inspired more than 50 similar programs dedicated to contemporary art at museums across the country. Chetrit’s MATRIX project marks the 193rd installation of the prescient series.

Talia Chetrit was born in 1982 in Washington DC. She now lives and works in New York.

Talia Chetrit’s solo exhibitions include Dickering, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles (2021); Joke, kaufmann repetto, New York (2020); Amateur, MAXXI, Rome (2018); Showcaller, Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2018); Poser, Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf (2017); AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2016); and I’m Selecting, Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf (2015). Chetrit’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; SculptureCenter, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Jewish Museum, New York; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Chetrit received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. She is represented by kaufmann repetto, New York and Milan; Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf; and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles.

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Talia Chetrit / MATRIX 193
October 6th, 2023 - January 7th, 2024