Matt Eich
I Love You, I’m Leaving

Matt Eich - I Love You, I’m Leaving

These works are recent additions to Matt Eich’s ongoing series I Love You, I’m Leaving. These photographs explore familial relationships. Eich borrows from personal experience and the visual language of the everyday to create a fictional account that echoes reality. The work is close to its maker, yet it operates like a mirror to emotion. Eich’s images draw-out threads of feelings we all know. This series began while the artist was experiencing personal domestic unease: his parents separated after 33 years of marriage, his last living grandparent passed away, and his own young family moved to a new city.

Matt Eich’s work tends to draw on a mix of emotion. Many times, feelings have a beginning and an end, but this work reminds us they also have angles, aspects, and fragments. Often the sense of tension in Matt Eich’s work is raised by our own alliances with the subjects or our absorption of emotions felt from all sides. Our compassion stirs the prickliness of connection-disconnection, longing, and hope.

Eich has a way of making his presence subconsciously recognized, yet invisible. His gaze and his subject’s gaze become our collective gaze. Our perspective is emboldened by expanded consciousness. This pushes the sense of belonging and palpability in I Love You, I’m Leaving, (while in Eich’s series The Invisible Yoke a similar approach translates more as urgency). Here, Matt Eich’s kitchen table feels like our own. The watching eyes of his daughters seem about to fall on us. We feel the mysticism in small, unlikely things. We long to feel the embrace of a father’s assurance, and to believe the way we did when we were children that “everything will be ok.”

Matt Eich - I Love You, I’m Leaving

Bored sisters in the kitchen, Charlottesville, Virginia. 2020
Untitled, Richmond, Virginia. 2018
Hugging Meira, Charlottesville, Virginia. 2020

I Love You, I’m Leaving by Matt Eich | *Price-Structure:
11 x 14 in. pigment print | Edition of 12 | $1,200
16 x 20 in. pigment print| Edition of 10 | $2,200
20 x 25 in. pigment print | Edition of 7 | $3,000
24 x 30 in. pigment print | Edition of 5 | $3,500
32 x 40 in pigment print | Edition of 3 | $4,000
*prints from this series available in two sizes, designated by the Artist