statement
My work examines how cultural myths—of home, authenticity, masculinity, and nature—are constructed and maintained through systems of mediation. Working across sculpture, performance, video, sound, and installation, I treat familiar environments not as neutral backdrops but as instructional spaces that train behavior and identity through repetition and enactment.
I am drawn to sites where authenticity is presumed to reside: the renovated home, the musical icon, the natural landscape. Rather than approaching these sites through direct critique, I inhabit their logics to the point of saturation, using performance to embody and strain the roles these environments demand. Transformation appears less as progress than as rehearsal—gestures endlessly repeated and aestheticized.
Processes of masking and legibility are central to my practice. Carefully managed performances often determine what remains intelligible, while other forms of desire or identification are displaced into style or affect. Recent projects combine architectural intervention, reenactment, and sampling to explore how intimacy, resistance, and ecological anxiety register indirectly—through atmosphere, affect, horror, humor, and excess. My work favors provisional structures that keep meaning unstable and in motion.
email: matthew@matthewmcgaughey.com phone: 310.622.3831