Matthew C. Wilson is a visual artist and filmmaker born in the United States (1982) and based in the Netherlands. In his videos, sculptures, and installations, viewers meet human, non-human, and inter-subjective agents that are entangled with natural processes and shape-shifting historical forces. His projects utilize research-oriented, site-specific, and methodologically eclectic approaches often drawing from the sciences to track the inertia of modernity through contemporary ecological crises and into speculative futures.
Wilson holds an MFA in visual arts from Columbia University and has been a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and the Jan van Eyck Academie. He has most recently been the KNAW – Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences artist-in-residence fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Amsterdam. He is also part of the 2024-2025 Enter the Hyper-Scientific cohort at EPFL – The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
Wilson’s moving image works have been screened on Vdrome.org, at IFFR – International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, and HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. He has presented his works in numerous exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad including at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, NL, Galeria Skala, Poznań, Poland, Walk&Talk Festival of Art, São Miguel, Azores, PT, Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool, UK, among others.
Matthew C. Wilson on mentoring
I approach mentoring and pedagogy in a holistic way, drawing in particular from systems thinking. First, I like to work together to identify, articulate, and refine the relationships between the information system, material system, and value system in an artist’s practice. Then, I like to think together about how these relate to larger systems, socially, culturally, and economically. We can even expand this to scales of planetary metabolism.
Everyone will have different goals and different skillsets and predispositions as their starting points. There are many paths, yet I believe strategic planning is a powerful approach for any path. Therefore, I like to take a strategic planning approach and think backwards from time horizons of the lifetime, ten years, three years, all the way down to weekly schedules. The aim with this intentional approach is to focus energy on actions that will accumulate over time to help build skills, relationships, and visibility for the artist — in connection with the artist’s overall profile and thematic interests.
My graduate program included a great deal of mentoring, and I draw from various approaches I experienced in my formative times as an artist. I was one of the core tutors in the temporary masters “F for Fact” at the Sandberg from 2020-2024. These, among other institutional and personal relationships and experiences all inform my approach. While my own practice focuses primarily around themes connected to science, ecology, and futurity, these are always evolving. I am driven by curiosity and have an extremely eclectic set of interests and bases of knowledge.