Written by Brian Ulrich

When I first started graduate school in Chicago, Matt Siber was one of the people I met who was pleasant enough to not only school me on the inner workings of the MFA program (he was one year ahead of me) but generous enough to lend one of his medium format cameras for several months. This began a friendship that took us photographing on road trips, traveling to lectures and exhibits together and sharing ideas and strategies. This summer I was honored to be in Matt's wedding and returned the favor by some super slick moves on the dance floor.

Matt Siber's photographs subverting advertising and consumer culture have had a profound and liberating impact on the visual world. Matt's early Untitled project separated the visual noise of our modern cities. By digitally removing the text from his landscape photographs of signs, signage and displays and recreating that same text in an diptych image, Matt empowers us to gain a footing in the ad surroundings. His investigating on the hegemonic use of the ad led him to further series Floating Logos (photographs of towering ad pole which seem to defy gravity in an all too familiar foreshadowing) and recently Compare To (product shots which act as advertisements themselves only for the no frills copies of brand name products).

Matt received his MFA from Columbia College in Chicago in 2003. He currently has a solo exhibition at the Billi Rubin Gallery in Berlin. His work is featured in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography. He's much more international than any of my other friends and his work is represented by the Galeria Antoni Pinyol in Reus, Spain, Galeria La Fabrica in Madrid, and Galerie f 5.6 in Munich.  He has been published in ArtForum, Flash Art, Aperture and EXIT Magazine and he has received grants from the Aaron Siskind Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council.

Have questions for Matt about his work? Leave them in the comments.