Matt Sheridan is finally back in Los Angeles after his residency in Japan with a massive body of innovative new work under his belt. Sheridan has been lighting up Japan with his paintings in motion for the past few months and has received some well deserved critical acclaim for his latest 21st century multi media projects.
Click on the below link to see some footage from Sheridan's installments in Tokyo and around Japan. We are currently exhibiting Vanishing Point in the gallery, come on in and check out this artists amazing work in person!
http://vimeo.com/121738914
Vanishing Point (Make Waves) (2015)
Catherine Harrington, curatorial intern at MOT (Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art) recently published this fantastic piece on the artist and his work:
Matt Sheridan: keeping the colours / taking out the words
It's the last stop before Narita airport and I’m one of the few passengers remaining as the train pulls into Shimosa-manzaki station. Through the windows, an architectural phantasm is cast in shifting patterns of coloured light. Although by going to see the new projections by Los Angeles-based artist Matt Sheridan I’m expecting a light show (in the dark), the scale of the glowing spectacle in this vacated location is unexpectedly enticing. Contrasted against a blackened horizon of rice fields, the affects on other spectators is tangible; cars stop; drivers lose track of the road - so effectively do the flashing lights colonise their ‘attention’.
Yet I’m also reminded how far this pastoral scene contrasts with one of the sites (or sights) that informs Sheridan’s projections; Times Square. Formerly a New Yorker, Sheridan recalls how he navigated Times Square at night, taking in the glare. He’d walk up close to the billboards and experience the text distorted and over-sized so that the words were no longer legible. “I wanted to keep the colours but take out the words” he reflects. A hint at a political gesture? The long history of public provocations in Times Square such as Jenny Holzer’s provocative “statements” or Ryoji Ikeda’s “test pattern” interferences at night may come to mind. Yet these works clearly operate as interventions. Sheridan, like his chimeric visuals, has more mercurial intent. For Sheridan may be as much influenced by fashion design and music as by Times Square, and seems to embrace buildings in the same way certain New York parties in the 1980s may have re-shaped Seventh Avenue.
Sheridan is most interested in movement. For him, even oil paintings are already in his words, “moving” through colour and gesture, with the desire to expand “participants’ movements directly toward, across and into the paintings.” “Painting-in-motion” is how he describes his practice. His use of public space is not site-specific but site-reactive. “As long as the painting activates or transforms the room [or building] it’s successful,” he states. Beginning with ritually painted marks which are then digitised, he forms collages and sequences. These collages are animated and matched to a gridded architectural support “like making a garment” so that the final projections fit the target surface or building. For Sheridan – though mediated, these remain paintings. It is unsurprising then that he cites Wade Guyton as a key influence, whose “paintings” are typographics or found images that he prints through an ink-jet printer. His gesture of ‘pressing print’ has been compared to Pollock’s ‘drip’.
In its delimitations, Guyton's outcomes have a clarity despite the uncertain results (paper jams, ink shortages, paper sizing). Sheridan's gesture of 'projection' however, seems more oblique, particularly in a public arena in which - in Foucault-Debordian terms - we are so aggressively commodified and controlled by flickering images. These are not new sites of contestation of course - for similar sites have been embattled with Holzer's counter-didactic “billboards”. But then, Sheridan does not intend to project- in-conflict or project-as-pastiche. Instead, VJ'd and metamorphosing, dressing buildings and walls, his projections appear and disappear in sync, silently accompanied by an expressive 'wooooow' or a muted Iron Man's 'whoooosh' .
And in Narita, spectators 'making shapes' in the shadows of the projector, seem to concur. Viewing Sheridan’s projections in the context of Tokyo, a friend later compared them to
Hanabi (“fireworks”) – an association Sheridan may not contest, but likely celebrate.
Catherine Harrington, 2015
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