The event will be held on March 11, 2027 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM.

About This Talk

Composer Michael Matthews has spent over thirty years writing music, and for the past thirteen years has pursued fine-art abstract photography as a parallel practice. In this talk he traces the overlap between the two disciplines, organizing the conversation around three concepts that composers and photographers share: Form (shape, structure, repetition, tension and release), Colour (timbre and harmony in music; tonal and chromatic palette in a photograph), and Density (texture, space, silence, and pace). The presentation will draw on examples from his own scores and photographs — including a survey of his abstract images from 2013 to the present and Gibbous Moon, his photo-and-poetry collaboration with Canadian poet Dennis Cooley. The talk includes short musical excerpts and closes with Q&A.

About Michael Matthews

Michael Matthews is a Canadian fine-art abstract photographer and composer, based in Victoria, British Columbia.  A recent member of the Victoria Camera Club, Michael’s path to photography began in childhood — his father and older brother were both dedicated amateur photographers, and Matthews worked alongside his father in the darkroom, an early apprenticeship in looking closely at images. That thread went dormant for decades while he built a career in music, then resurfaced in 2013, when he began pursuing abstract photography in earnest as a parallel practice.

His abstract work has since been exhibited in Minneapolis, Austin, San Antonio, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Berlin. In 2021 he collaborated with Canadian poet Dennis Cooley on Gibbous Moon, a book pairing his photographs with Cooley's poetry, published by At Bay Press. He is currently developing a new photo book and building out his online portfolio.

Matthews's other life is as a composer: he holds a Ph.D. in composition from North Texas State University, taught for 27 years at the University of Manitoba (now Professor Emeritus), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His music has earned commissions and awards across North America and Europe, including a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center. He often speaks about the concepts — form, colour, density — that his two practices share.