In Kelly Link’s short story “Stone Animals,” a couple moves into a haunted house. There are no ghosts or apparitions and nothing malevolent in the house itself. They just know, with certainty, that some of their objects — a mug, a garden sculpture, the cat — are now haunted.
The same kind of charge comes through in the photos on display in “Seven Year Itch: Matthew Thorsen Basement Treasures,” which opened last Friday and runs through January 24 at the S.P.A.C.E. Gallery in Burlington. Thorsen’s distinctive eye and the way he framed some of the pieces give them a spooky, uncanny vibe, like the things in Link’s story. “We’re itching to feel his energy again and then see his process and his artwork and how he saw the world,” gallery director Nikki Laxar said.
Thorsen shot photos for Seven Days for 23 years, beginning just after the paper started in 1995, and was named its first (and still only) staff photographer in 2014. He became especially known for his portraits of musicians, artists, politicians, comedians, farmers and misfits of all sorts. His early black-and-white images, with thick black borders, set an edgy and artistic tone for the publication that has informed its identity for three decades. Thorsen died of cancer on January 1, 2019 — seven years and one day before the show’s opening.
Seven Days art director Diane Sullivan was married to Thorsen; they were partners for two decades. She hadn’t been thinking about a show until plumbing work in her basement forced her to start moving parts of the massive archive Thorsen left behind. “I’m the keeper of the treasures,” she said during the show’s installation, “and it’s time to share them and get them out.”
To call Thorsen prolific would be a vast understatement. Sullivan said he didn’t go anywhere without a camera — “only the shower, and sometimes in bed.” And before digital photography, he made prints of everything. “There’s tubs and tubs and tubs and tubs and tubs and tubs of them,” Sullivan said, in addition to all of the digital images and works he framed himself, often in beat-up or kitschy frames he found in thrift stores.
That volume of photographs is why what’s on view at the S.P.A.C.E. gallery may seem somewhat random — because it is. It’s not meant as a full career retrospective, or a selection of themed works, though there are a few distinct groups of images in the show.
A series of curling black-and-white prints Thorsen took in the 1990s in Asia and France is nailed onto framed backgrounds taken from handwritten travel journals. There are tiny photos of the word “OK” spray-painted on pavement or sidewalks by utility workers. A few 1990s band images and a multimedia display are taken from the Burlington nonprofit music org Big Heavy World’s 2011 traveling exhibition of Thorsen’s work, “Sound Proof.” And there’s a whole wall of tacked-up, loose black-and-white prints, some of them recognizable from Seven Days stories past.
However, stripped of context, many of the singular works on view retain a haunted quality. That isn’t because the artist is no longer with us. It’s because he so successfully shows us a narrative we didn’t know was there, one that remains unresolved.
In one black-and-white image from the 1990s, a child holding a helium balloon stares down at a dead deer on the sidewalk. On the back of the frame, Thorsen has written, “An old woman comes out of the butcher shop and said she and children can hear the souls of dear[sic] after they had died. The dear said they did not want to be shot.” His misspelling only adds to the creepiness.
A color still life from the year 2000 pictures a pair of red candles that can only be described as flaccid; another, from 2001, a crushed blue garbage bin. It’s unclear what has happened, exactly, but both convey an enticing wrongness.
When he was a child, Thorsen’s parents bred and raised monkeys in their house, and sold them for use in medical testing — a history that, Sullivan said, “definitely scarred him forever.” Thorsen loved animals of all kinds. Images of monkeys do appear in some of the pieces in the show, but more than that, he seems to have absorbed their energy: joyful and a little dangerous.
Thorsen delighted in transgression. One suite of photos, actually taken by Sullivan, pictures the photographer peeing in odd places, under glittery lettering proclaiming “Freedom for my peepole.” Another image, this one labelled “Piece of Shit,” is, well, exactly that, on a sidewalk where the word “Potty” has been written into the cement.
Seven Days received hundreds of remembrances about Thorsen after his death from people he had photographed, many of whom recounted his otherworldly energy, his kindness, his sense of humor and, above all, how he made them feel seen in a new way. Looking at his work — a small sliver of the tens (or likely, hundreds) of thousands of photos he took — allows even those of us who didn’t know him to see his personality reflected in the way he pictured the world.
Sullivan said that, as Thorsen was dying, she promised him she’d take care of his artwork, “and I think part of that is showing it,” she said, despite the daunting size of the archive. While she’ll always be grieving, she’s happy to reconnect with Thorsen’s work and wants the rest of the community to have an opportunity to remember him. “It’s more of a celebration,” she said. “Like, What a hoot that guy was!”
“Seven Year Itch: Matthew Thorsen Basement Treasures,” on view through January 24 at the S.P.A.C.E. Gallery in Burlington.
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The original print version of this article was headlined “Un-Thor-gettable | A posthumous show brings together an eclectic selection of photographer Matthew Thorsen’s work”
This article appears in January 7 • 2026.
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