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, including the domestic interior, the musical icon, and the natural landscape. Rather than approaching these spaces through direct critique, I inhabit their logics to the point of saturation, using performance and architectural intervention to embody and strain the roles they demand. Transformation emerges less as progress than as rehearsal, with gestures endlessly repeated and aestheticized until they become ambient conditions.
Processes of masking and legibility are central to my practice. Managed performances determine what remains intelligible, while other forms of desire or identification are displaced into style, affect, or atmosphere. Recent projects combine reenactment and sampling to explore how intimacy, resistance, and ecological anxiety register indirectly through horror, humor, and excess. I construct provisional structures that hold these tensions in suspension, keeping meaning unstable and in motion.
email: matthew@matthewmcgaughey.com phone: 310.622.3831