Haines Gallery is pleased to present From the ashes, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Los Angeles–based experimental photographer Matthew Brandt (b. 1982), known for his inventive, materially driven processes that merge subject and substance.

From the ashes brings together five interrelated bodies of work, including San Francisco dust, January skies, Florida strangler, Eagles, and Wai‘anae — each defined by the artist’s characteristic fusion of conceptual rigor and material experimentation. Taken together, these series explore how photography’s physical and chemical foundations can mirror the social, environmental, and political realities of the world they depict.

Drawing on the medium’s early, alchemical beginnings, Brandt frequently develops his photographs using materials gathered from the places they represent, such as lake water and dirt. “Most of what I do,” Brandt explains, “stems from the relationship between the photographic subject and its representational material. Each methodology has its own baggage to carry, and that baggage becomes part of the work’s meaning.” Through this approach, Brandt extends photography’s indexical function — its capacity to be of something as much as about it — transforming images into tangible traces of what they depict