In 1831 Charles Darwin was almost denied passage on the H.M.S. Beagle by the ship's captain because the captain did not like the shape of Darwin's nose. Darwin nearly missed the voyage that led him to theorize natural selection (a theory based, in part, on observations he made of the variation in shape of finches' beaks in the Galapagos Islands) because the Beagle's captain was a follower of Johann Caspar Lavater and a believer in physiognomy.

Matthew Buckingham's new work Subcutaneous, a double-screen 16mm film installation and book traces out a history of physiognomy - the belief that a person's personality might literally be read on the surface of the face through analysis of physical appearance - as it was developed and criticized in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment with special emphasis on the contemporary legacies of physiognomy in film and photography.

In Europe, almost a century before Darwin's voyage, the emergence of a new middle class and related changes, such as the repeal of sumptuary laws which regulated clothing according to social standing, created a demand for new tools of social navigation. Lavater's enormous four-volume treatise, "The Physiognomic Fragments, Intended to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind", not only attempted to fill this gap, but claimed to reconcile science and religion while effectively employing xenophobia and racism to justify European expansion through colonization

The matrix of friendships and rivalries surrounding the publication of Lavater's book, which included a very young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the highly critical physicist G.C. Lichtenberg, form a narrative that is explored through Buckingham's installation and book in two different ways. The double-screen film presents placeless people and people-less places that evoke and question film's capacity to construct historical memory through conventions of acting, costumes, and props. Conversely, the book juxtaposes the narrative with photo-documentation of the actual sites in Switzerland and Germany where Lavater's physiognomy was written and criticized. While connecting these places to their past the book firmly locates them in the present, emphasizing the ways in which eighteenth-century physiognomy continues to reverberate in society and culture today.

Matthew Buckingham has had solo exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm and the National Art Museum, Copenhagen (with Joachim Koester). He has participated in Greater New York, P.S.1. His films have been screened at the Arnolfini, Bristol, the Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen, the Konsthall, Malmö, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and in various international film festivals. He is currently working on a commission by the Minetta Brook Foundation for the Hudson Valley Project. This is his second solo show at Murray Guy.