David Mather

David Mather received his PhD in 2011 from the Art History, Theory, and Criticism Program at University of California, San Diego. His dissertation on early Italian futurism was an interdisciplinary project that investigated the visual structure of movement across the mediums of painting, cinema, sculpture, and photography. His work situates these creative practices among diverse social and intellectual currents of that period, such as their key relations to the discourses of automatism. He is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where he is investigating color theories and practices in the early 20th century, looking at the interchange between science and the avant-garde and at the relationship between color, time, and perception in particular. His published writings and interviews have appeared in LEONARDO, the Sarai Reader, Left History journal, and SITES Architecture, as well as in edited volumes and exhibition catalogs. He has also curated contemporary exhibits involving electronic media and sound art, along with more traditional mediums, and has worked with several Los Angeles-area nonprofit arts organizations: Southern California Consortium of Art Schools, the Fellows of Contemporary Art, West of Rome, and the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound.