Matthew Regier is an artist and printmaker who grew up on a corn farm in South Central Nebraska. He is a self-taught artist whose formal study is in philosophy and theology. Regier now lives in Matfield Green, Kansas, a town of about 50 people in the tallgrass prairie of the Flint Hills. He and his wife, Tia, are co-founders of The School for Rural Culture and Creativity, a community space that seeks to integrate art, agriculture, and ecology into a vision for a place-based life on the land. Regier is also a gardener and the minister of the Matfield Community Church.
Regier’s prints attend to the prairie as an ecosystem of which the artist is a part. The practice of landscape is not simply a case of observing but of being observed. There is no fixed, objective point to view the world but only an exploration from within. In this way, the images are a mapping not only of the outside world, but of the inner one. For Regier, the artist is an embodied knower whose vision, in the words of philosopher Maurice Merlau-Ponty, “opens upon a texture of being.”
