Andrea Mato

The Frame You’re Holding 

The Frame You’re Holding explores how my photographer’s eye transitioned into a graphic designer’s voice. The projects presented explore how to weave the textural and subjective qualities of photography into a design context. My practice explores how the frames of graphic design—the page of a book, the browser window, or the wall of an exhibition—can be expanded or reimagined. As a designer, I became the translator of content into form, seeking to author the design while collaborating with other voices. The Frame You’re Holding is a snapshot of my practice as a graphic designer, encapsulating my intuitive process and way of seeing.

de_re_construction.indd
2025
10 x 14"

I wondered if photographs of architectural lines could become graphic materials to generate posters? And if the photographic documentation of graphics could become the design itself? de_re_construction.indd is a poster series and a publication that explores this idea. Photographs of architectural lines in the streets became graphic elements to generate posters, and the accompanying book reveals how these posters are constructed. The posters emerged through a layered process of photographing, printing, mounting in the streets, and re-photographing.

Where Nothing Has Ever Happened exhibition poster
2026
36 x 48"

Where Nothing Has Ever Happened is an exhibition at the Gelman Gallery in the RISD Museum that proposes a pace shift, a reorientation toward the quiet and the barely perceptible. The works selected resist sensory hierarchy, delay knowing, and invite viewers to perceive the speculative, the out-of-focus, and the fragile. It is in this space of openness between seeing and sensing that clarity dissolves, yet new connections arise in the internal drift.

Where Nothing Has Ever Happened was curated by Andrea Mato, Dahlia Aggarwal, and Kyle Gyumin Dong. Photograph by Kyle Gyumin Dong.

Where Nothing Has Ever Happened
2026
Spray paint on ground

Exhibition title graphic. Photograph by Kyle Gyumin Dong.

homesickness: A BIPOC Cinema Zine
Cover and back cover of Issue no. 2.
10 x 8"

homesickness is an annual publication that centers the work of filmmakers and artists of color. Issue no. 2 was a 374 page collaborative effort with the co-editors and filmmakers Alfonso Morgan-Terrero and Kevin Xian Ming Yu. 

scale journal, issue No. 1
2025
6 x 9"

scale journal is a publication bridging various disciplines at Brown University and RISD. The focus is on the built environment, seeking to promote writing and projects that explore belonging and space.

The Issue No. 1 was produced in 2025 under the editorship of Henry Ding, with Ram Charan, Roy Kim, and Hannah Oh serving as Managing Editors. Editors Katie Kim, Simone Klein, Oliver McGovern, and Zorka Zsembery shaped the editorial content alongside writers Hrishita Acharya, Sarkis Antoyan, Siya Girdhar, and Jin Xu. The issue was designed by Andrea Mato and Isabel Lee.

Algún Día Cruzaré el Océano or Someday I’ll Cross the Ocean
2025
Website design and photography.

Algún Día Cruzaré el Océano or Someday I’ll Cross the Ocean is a bilingual poetic scroll website that reinterprets my family photographs through an interplay of photography and poetry. The reinterpretations involve Photoshop interventions through cropping, highlighting, or obscuring sections, seeking for new meaning in my family archive.

Every Time I Conjure a Stone I Throw It
2025
Exhibition posters
27.55 x 39.37"

For the identity of the MFA Photography exhibition Every Time I Conjure A Stone, I Throw It, I explored how to represent photography without using photographs, while seeking to encompass all of the participating artists’ work. The gradients in the posters evoke shifts in light, and the typography, set in backslanted and italic, moves in response to the show’s title, echoing the motion of images. The backslant and italic treatment for the title extends to the treatment of the photographers’ names both for the posters, and for the exhibition vinyl graphics.