We are such stuff as dreams are made on* and the exhibition of Matt McCormick Running on Empty brings it to light. The Los Angeles Californian looks back on his adolescence, to that moment when a new world opens up for everyone, producing intimate films and powerful ideals. McCormick provides the keys to his works, poised between contemporary mythologies and peaceful summits.

« Running On Empty explore adolescence as though it were, in a way, an atmospheric condition—formative, fractured, and unfinished. It is a space where one encounters the world in all its volatility: moments of intimacy and violence, of calm and speed, of discovery and shame. These years are often presented as a period from which we detach ourselves. Yet they shape the architecture of our perception—what we hope for, what we dread, what remains within us.

My work oscillates between painting, sculpture, video, and photography, but the guiding thread is not the medium—it is memory. Not memory as a trace, but memory as sensation: the way it distorts, repeats, disappears, and re-emerges. The images I use are not autobiographical, but they feel as though they could be. They are pulled from digital platforms—Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube—meaning spaces that now function as archives of collective memory. They reflect the way an entire generation has learned to experience itself: through reblogged emotions, ambient imagery, and the aesthetics of second-hand nostalgia.

There is a shift that interests me – that of adolescence lived in the open air, physical and unfiltered, toward an adolescence now increasingly synonymous with isolation, observed through screens. This work follows this movement – not to criticize it, but to observe what has changed. How experience is structured. How identity repeats itself. How memory records fewer events and more of what has been documented, shared, or endlessly replayed.

I am not trying to tell stories in a linear way. The work is more structured in fragments: small ruptures, unresolved gestures, open loops. The tone oscillates between tenderness and unease. Some moments seem cinematic, but the narrative is unstable, disjointed, just like memory. Certain images repeat from one medium to another, but their meaning changes depending on the context—like a phrase that rings strangely after being repeated too often.

There is also the matter of myth. American youth is constantly mythologized – by the media, advertising, art. It is aestheticized and flattened, even in its most volatile expressions. This work refuses that. It tries to make contradictions coexist: beauty and violence, joy and danger, freedom and disillusionment. Not to resolve them, but to make room for the emotional weight they carry.

Running On Empty does not deal solely with adolescence. The exhibition also explores how adolescence persists within us. How these early experiences – regardless of their degree of abstraction or fragmentation – continue to shape our way of remembering, of constructing meaning, and of perceiving ourselves in motion through the world. It is about the tension between what we have lived and what we have absorbed. What we carry within us, even without knowing it.»
Matt McCormick

* After William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1610