Matthew Mann returns to his alma mater for a one-man show in the UCM Gallery of Art & Design. Mann’s exhibition will feature 14 recently created oil on canvas paintings.

These Topocosm paintings are from an ongoing series that makes use of the genre of landscape painting as a conceptual space for puzzling over vagaries and correspondences between pictorial language, visual experience, and narrative meaning which are central to my work as a whole.

The term topocosm was coined by Theodor H. Gaster and serves as an undercarriage for this series of paintings. For Gaster a topocosm reflects “the entire complex of any given locality conceived as a living organism”. Along with topographical features, the landscape for Gaster included the use, weather, and belief systems operating within a whole terrain.