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Click on image to enlarge.

This video was also in the show, Couple.

Statement:

Modernity was a process of drawing attention to the frame, to the framer, to the way power creates visibility and invisibility. Today the artist is little more than a framer, a collector, someone who “organizes a clash” between the disparate experiences of the modern world. Inside my frames I’ve put a thin stain, a shiny ribbon, those feminine, lyrical things a seamstress might use. I’m after those pleasurable experiences where we loose the ego and experience the other, the outside. These moments are always tinged with loss, but they point to a better possible world, a world denied by entrenched powers. But what is denied in reality: utopia, fantasy, and rebellion, is allowed in art. Art is  rhetorical liberation, but it is liberation.

This video, Show Me and Angel, was also included in the show.

click on image to enlarge

Statement:

I believe in God. I’ve met him. He’s a computer hacker who lives in Philadelphia. He lives alone in a drafty apartment and doesn’t really like the city and is very lonely. And all he wants is a good long complicated conversation with a girl. He doesn’t like money that much, but he’s gotta eat like the rest of us, so he does computer repair jobs on the side. He has trouble with women. He doesn’t quite get them. He feels socially awkward. He’s getting fat and loosing his hair and feels uncomfortable in his own skin. He tries to get up at dawn to watch the sunrise but he sleeps in most of the time. He’s going through a gangster phase, wearing lots of jewelry and sunglasses. He knows he shouldn’t, but he likes fashion and clothes even though he hates stores and shopping. He knows his contradictions and he deals with them as best he can. But sometimes God is depressed. And he talks to a shrink and he’s like, “I really don’t think I should get on medication, doc,” but his psychologist convinces him that he should so he does and he feels out of it most of the time and sometimes he looks around and is like, “shit, man, you guys have really done a number on this place.” And he remembers the first few days when he was actively making animals and stuff and how happy he was back then. And how maybe he should have left some things out of this world and put in some others but it’s a little late for that now. And every once in a while he’ll look up and see how pretty the night sky is and how vast it is and how empty and scary and he cries and he’s not sure if it’s that old clichéd experience of beauty that’s making him cry or something else. He can’t quite explain it. And this is confusing of course because everyone expects God to know everything and all that. He joins a sewing club and makes clothes with a few retired women. And he gives too much away to make a living off of it, but he really starts to enjoy himself again. And he starts to read again and going to church a little bit and thinks maybe he’ll move somewhere where it’s warmer. And he goes south and travels for a while and he ends up staying somewhere in the mountains of Ecuador. And he’s there now, and he writes letters sometimes to old friends and people who have died and sometimes, when he’s feeling good, he sews.

Matt Christy