statement
My artistic practice originates from my experience as a composer writing music for reality television in LA for fourteen years. The genre of music I produced aimed to enhance specific narrative emotional registers that satisfied commercial standards. In these worlds, characters are set to inhabit a prescriptive set of emotional possibilities to entice the viewer into similar affective zones. I noticed how the codes and structures I was helping produce were also seeping into my body, manifesting themselves in my life. I became interested in how these products infiltrate our bodies and craft conforming ways of viewership, emotional possibility, and social behavior.
Transitioning between my role as composer to visual artist, I analyze and juggle the codes, formulas, and processes of television production and the entertainment industry. Entangling diverse mediums such as sculpture, video, and performance, I investigate how commercial media representation conspires to define identity, social interaction, and affective connections. I utilize production practices and elements such as sets, archetypal characters, scripts, cameras, and foley props as tools to conjure a critical playground and a space to decenter normative identities. By reenacting stories and re-mixing those production elements typically hidden from view, I try to ignite disruptions and slippages in the artifice of narrative. In doing so, the carefully crafted simulations of commercial media teeter, challenging the viewer’s comfort zones and the validity of what they are absorbing. As the surface of representation slowly shatters, new speculative languages and scenarios start to arise.
Acknowledging my position in the apparatus of entertainment production, I utilize my own body to both metabolize and exorcize the cultural formulas and mechanisms of television. Thus, my body becomes a vessel for exploration. I allow it to be possessed or haunted by tropes, archetypal characters, or family members: a varied repertoire that encompasses, for example, Fixer Upper’s Chip Gaines, a California yoga guru, a hunter, and the spirit of my long-deceased grandmother. As they inhabit my body, they experience and engage with repetitive or aimless actions, behave erratically or off-script or find themselves in improbable scenarios. The characters dive into moments of strange humor, stasis, delirium, spiraling chaos, or unexpected violence. Props made of wax and silicone serving as bodily stand-ins come alive and turn into the main characters, whereas the human bodies become as lifeless as mannequins. The space of production and location starts to expand. The characters walk, crawl, and fall behind, spilling violently through the edges of the sets and stages. Through these strategies, the back side of production processes is revealed. Escaping the boundaries of the frame and dissolving the binaries of the on-screen/off-screen, these two-dimensional characters claim fresh agencies and find abode in new territories of possibility. Breaking free from the limited set of behaviors they have been programmed to operate under, alternate modes of being emerge for them and, thus, for the viewer. In these abstracted lands of play, failure, irresolution, and doubt pierce through the manicured and aseptic mythologies produced by commercial television. By raising questions of viewership and propelling ruptures in the predictable formulas of media entertainment, I push against their homogenizing nature to offer more nuanced, complex, and non-normative modes of relation and, perhaps, suggest new forms of liberation.
email: matthew@matthewmcgaughey.com phone: 310.622.3831