statement
"I am trying to make honest work. The fake is the closest I have gotten."
For fourteen years I wrote music for reality television. The industry term for what I did is soundalike: music written to replicate other music, surface performing as surface, meaning removed at the point of production. My job was to make you feel things, on purpose, at exactly the right moment, without you knowing I was doing it.
What eventually became impossible to ignore was that this logic was everywhere. Watching Fixer Upper one night, shiplap and open-concept reveals and carefully managed emotion, I realized I was looking at a live demonstration of everything I had been doing professionally for fourteen years. A house that wasn't really a house. Feelings that weren't really feelings. The copy so convincing it no longer needs the original. And the strange part: the wanting doesn't stop even when you realize there's nothing real behind the image. The feeling just keeps going.
I left, went back to school, and started making work about what I had been living inside. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, and video, I take the environments and images that seduce me most and push them past the point of comfort, until you can't ignore what they were doing to you all along. Seductive and slightly wrong. Funny and frightening in ways that are hard to separate.
This logic runs through everything I make. Renovation Game takes Fixer Upper as its direct entry point, the renovation show as apparatus, scripting domesticity and aspiration into surfaces that imprint themselves without consent. Staged follows the same logic into Kurt Cobain: what remains when an act of defiance becomes a marketable surface, and what it means to keep reenacting it. Grandma's House turns the inquiry inward, where the scripts are not televised but no less constructed. I become a puppet in a game of ghostly possession, reenacting memories of my grandmother until the roles fracture and something genuinely strange emerges. The domestic interior, the rock star, the grandmother. Different icons, the same trap.
I make this work because I am not immune to these images. I don't think anyone is.
email: matthew@matthewmcgaughey.com phone: 310.622.3831