The body, accumulation and materiality are central to my investigation of the intimate and often destructive gestures produced by relationships and social structures. Found objects and common materials intersect with the delicately hand-made producing strange, violent transformations and un-decidable objects. Elements of photography, painting, collage, sculpture and installation mutually confront the idiosyncratic nature of gender and identity.
-Matt Davis
2008 Thesis Exhibition Statement
Gallery 400, Chicago, IL


“Matt Davis will seal your soul by scratching, erasing, eroding, decorating, and lacerating your picture in time. He is attendant to the physicality of the image, like an alchemist is attendant to the transmutation of common metals. The power an image has, whether in the spheres of the spectacle or the psychological. You tear a photo of an ex, idolize a photo of an influential person, deface an image of a politician, and cherish a photo of relatives. All these actions disrupt the document, adding an extra-personal layer, a latent material-based psychological attachment to the surface image. An external-internal bond captured in a deposit that forms after the paper has been developed and handled. This is the layer Davis flays, treating the photographic surface, the actual paper as a ground for gestures. This body modification coupled with iconography of the most intrusive kind imaginable: almost a spell. Every mark to the material photograph alters the image and the spirit body. A form of exposure only a photograph can provide, the capture of its own being obliterated in effigy.”

-Anthony Elms
Assistant Director, Gallery 400, Chicago, IL.
University of Illinois at Chicago-MFA publication. 2008. [ more information ]

AD 531 - Advanced Studio Arts, Prof. Anthony Tasset