THE GLEANERS: This current series of photographs focuses on a
small group of primitive skills practitioners who attend the annual
buffalo hunt on the perimeter of Yellowstone National Park in
Montana to scavenge animal parts and other animal products left
behind by Native American hunters. After offering assistance to
hunters by field dressing, skinning, quartering and carrying off
buffalo to vehicles for transportation, any meat scraps left behind
are canned or packaged, fat is rendered and placed in jars, hides
are tanned and bones are used to make primitive tools and
ornamental objects. These individuals see themselves as a neutral
party to the often controversial polemic around the hunt and
management of Yellowstone buffalo, and aim to make use of what
would otherwise be left behind.
Matt Hamon is a portrait photographer who lives in rural Montana. His photography exists conceptualy and aesthetically in the spaces between photojournalism and staged editorial imagery. Matt hails from a small, remote town in Northern California. A sense of place informed by wandering the woods as a child inspires his enquiry. Self-described as "post-rural"*, Matt currently lives in Potomac, Montana near the Blackfoot River and teaches in the School of Art at the University of Montana in Missoula. Matt is a featured artist in Scott Ligon's forthcoming book from Watson-Guptil/Random House, "Digital Art Revolution."
* Postrural is a term used by Matt Hamon and Issara Willenskomer to describe the experience of coming of age in remote, rural areasof the country and later contextualizing these experiences in the narative content of contemporary art.
