Based in Los Angeles, California, Christy Matson merges the precision of handweaving with the expressive qualities of painting through a manually operated Jacquard loom. Her work, often referencing landscape, balances structure and fluidity, capturing a sense of place through woven form. Matson’s process begins with oil pastel drawings, watercolors, and other works on paper, which she translates into weave structures using a distinctive digital approach. As the loom follows her instructions, she improvises with the weft (horizontal rows) with ingenuity and nuance, introducing subtle shifts in color, structure and texture. The result challenges conventional notions of both art objects and the act of making itself. Matson received her BFA from the University of Washington and her MFA from California College of the Arts. She has since had solo exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Cranbrook Art Museum and the Long Beach Art Museum. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Knoxville Museum of Art, The Asheville Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Renwick
Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Cranbrook Art Museum, The Mint Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Renwick Gallery.