Matthew McHugh

"I was born in Fort Collins, Colorado. I earned a BFA in drawing from Colorado State University in 2016, and went on to earn an MFA in drawing, painting, and printmaking from Purdue University in 2021. Currently, I am living out my passion for teaching and art as a college art instructor in Northern Colorado.
Despite the unreliability of tools like language, the senses, history, and memory, I still rely on these tools to interact with the world and derive fragments of meaning. By assembling these fragments into a flexible narrative, I create my sense of self as a simplified composite of experiences, influences, reactions, ideas, and contexts. My artwork explores the act of self-contextualization through the lenses of time, identity narratives, and mortality. I often reference paleolithic art, the sublime, and the uncanny to echo how vast time and the world’s complexity are in relation to the smaller scale of an individual."