We are such stuff as dreams are made on* ,  and Matt McCormick’s exhibition Running on Empty brings that to life. The Los Angeles-based Californian revisits his teenage years—a time when, for each of us, a new world opens up, filled with intimate stories and powerful ideals. McCormick offers insight into his work, navigating between contemporary mythologies and moments of serene elevation.

“Running On Empty explores adolescence as a kind of atmospheric condition—formative, fractured, and unfinished. It’s a space where the world is first encountered in all its volatility: moments of intimacy and violence, stillness and speed, discovery and shame. These years are often framed as something we outgrow, but they shape the architecture of how we see—what we long for, what we fear, and what stays with us.

The work moves between painting, sculpture, video, and photography, but the throughline isn’t medium—it’s memory. Not memory as record, but memory as sensation: how it distorts, repeats, vanishes, and reemerges. The images I use aren’t autobiographical, but they feel like they could be. They’re sourced from digital platforms—Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube—places that now function as collective memory archives. They reflect the way a generation has learned to experience itself: through reblogged emotion, ambient imagery, and the aesthetics of secondhand nostalgia.

There’s a shift I’m interested in—from adolescence as something lived outdoors, physical and unfiltered, to something increasingly remote, observed through screens. This work traces that movement—not to critique it, but to sit with what’s changed. How experience becomes curated. How identity gets rehearsed. How memory becomes less about what happened, and more about what was documented, shared, or endlessly replayed.

I’m not trying to tell stories in a linear way. The work deals more in fragments—small ruptures, unresolved gestures, open loops. The tone shifts between tenderness and unease. There are moments that feel cinematic, but the narrative is unstable, disjointed, like memory itself. Some images repeat across mediums, but shift in meaning depending on their context—like a phrase that starts to sound strange after you say it too many times.

There’s also a question of myth. American youth is constantly mythologized—by media, by advertising, by art. It’s aestheticized and flattened, even in its most volatile forms. This work pushes back on that. It tries to hold the contradictions: beauty and violence, joy and danger, freedom and disillusionment. Not to resolve them, but to leave space for the emotional weight they carry.

Running On Empty isn’t just about adolescence. It’s about how adolescence stays with us. How those early experiences—no matter how abstract or fragmented—continue to shape the way we remember, the way we construct meaning, and the way we see ourselves moving through the world. It’s about the tension between what we lived and what we’ve absorbed. What we carry, even if we don’t know it.”

Matt McCormick