Matt McCormick Traces the Afterlife in 'Long Distance Call'

Summary

Matt McCormick presents ‘Long Distance Call,’ his first solo exhibition with Ruttkowski;68 in New York.The show explores how images shift in meaning as they are repeated, inherited, remembered and circulated over time.Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, works on paper and film, McCormick blurs the line between lived experience, memory and cultural mythology.

Matt McCormick is set to present ‘Long Distance Call,’ his first solo exhibition with Ruttkowski;68, opening at the gallery’s New York space this September.

Working across painting, sculpture, installation, works on paper and film, McCormick builds a visual world where memory, popular imagery and personal history are difficult to separate. His work has long pulled from the iconography of American life, but in ‘Long Distance Call,’ the emphasis shifts toward the way those images are carried forward and reshaped over time. As the gallery describes it, “pictures rarely reach us intact.” Instead, they are “repeated, reproduced, retold, and passed between people and across generations,” accumulating new meanings with every encounter.

That instability sits at the center of the exhibition. McCormick places images rooted in his own experience alongside those inherited from family, encountered through photographs or absorbed from the wider culture, without establishing a clear hierarchy between them.

The show also considers the gap between making an image and eventually encountering it. Ruttkowski;68 describes that distance as “at once elastic and idiosyncratic,” a space where context can shift and an image can become detached from the circumstances that first produced it.

Rather than attempting to restore those references to some original meaning, ‘Long Distance Call’ looks at what remains after they have traveled: the associations, memories and projections that ultimately become part of the image itself.

Matt McCormick’s ‘Long Distance Call’ is on view at Ruttkowski;68 New York from September 10 through October 17, 2026.

Ruttkowski;68
46 Cortlandt Alley
New York, NY 10013

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