Matt Eich, I Love You, I’m Leaving

September 6–30 2018

First Thursday opening reception: September 6, 6:00–9:00 PM
Artist talk with Matt Eich: Saturday, September 8, 3:00 PM

“This series borrows from personal experience, and the visual language of the everyday in order to create a fictional account that mirrors my reality. Photographs are reductions, distillations, half-truths and complete fabrications. They can only describe the surface of things, while I am interested in the intangible – memory and emotional resonance.”

Matt Eich photographed I Love You, I’m Leaving during a difficult time in his family’s life: his parents separated after 33 years of marriage, while his siblings were experiencing drastic changes in their personal lives and he and his wife and two children moved to a new city. This emotionally-charged black-and-white series is not strictly memoir, but exists somewhere in-between documentary and fiction. For Eich, the title reflects a constant in his life, which he calls “the rhythm of my peripatetic life.” He notes that “it holds true when I leave my family to photograph strangers, and leave strangers to return home.”

Matt Eich (b. 1986) studied photojournalism at Ohio University and holds an MFA in Photography from Hartford Art School’s International Limited-Residency Program. He is a Professional Lecturer of Photography at The George Washington University and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife and two daughters. Matt’s work has been widely exhibited and received numerous grants and recognitions, including PDN’s 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch, the Joop Swart Masterclass, an Aaron Siskind Fellowship, and two Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography. Matt’s prints are held in the permanent collections of The Portland Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The New York Public Library, Chrysler Museum of Art and others. This is Eich’s second solo show at Blue Sky.