A Note:

The article following touches on some darkness that cast a shadow on my path for many years.

I’ve been criticized for sharing this. I’ve been told that it cuts too close to bone and that “I should keep personal experiences like this out of public eye.

More importantly, I’ve also thanked for shedding light on this trauma. I’m am, to my great disappointment and relief, not the only person who has had to navigate this shadow. My art is my journey, non-linear though it may be. Discovering this visual aesthetic and storytelling style has closed some of the holes left by my experience. I still live with the shadow, but it doesn’t darken my day like it used to.

Why I create art…

My response to sexual abuse as a child was to build a wall between myself and the rest of the world. I grew up not being able to trust my own thoughts because, when I was told that I lied about events I shut the events away and believed instead that I was a liar. I lived with memories that I believed false yet still wrestled with constantly. The result was that I placed a filter between myself and the world and shut myself in with my demons.

I felt isolated and, until I found art in my 20s, I had not even tried to climb my way out from behind the walls I erected. The isolation became solitude over the years, I learned how invaluable it is to confront your demons, to converse with your ego, and to reach for higher plains within yourself through understanding. That introspection shows up often in the stories that I attach to my art.

Today, I recognize so many people avoiding their inner personas. I invite them into the idea of “comfortable isolation”; being in a space away from the chaotic world of easy distraction, where they can confront their inner voices, grow from their debates, and strive for those higher plains of existence that are built on the knowledge of one's self.

Visually, this idea manifests in the compositions I choose for my work. I try to isolate the subject within a larger space. In that larger space I create a warm-emptiness. A place that feels with the viewer instead the viewer of being alone.

Here I stroll, memory underfoot, through this land that is also me; on fragments of memory that are the foundation of this experience; against a shearing wind eroding the “I” from these histories in an attempt to restore innocence from cause and remove responsibility for effect. Among the rubble I search for the root from which I have grown, the purest “I” in observation of all the things that I am not.
I am a witness to the weathering of these worlds within. To beliefs being defined by thought as surely as mountains are carved by the wind in truth. I am a witness to the universe experiencing itself, experiencing myself in a constant state of becoming… **a quiet contemplation of the world at large**.
See more from Iceland Real and Imagined

Three photographs displaying art of Jason Matias. A lonely boat, a hammock of tropical water in black and white, and a mountain peak (Mt Olympus) peaking through clouds.

Photographs going back as far as 2012 exhibited this feeling, even before I had done the work to understand it or even had a name for it. I'm still unpacking a lot of what this means today. You can find more of my work at www.jasonmatias.com where this art has found itself in both landscape photography and artful nude photography.

Thank you for being a part of my journey.
Jason