statement
My artistic practice originates from my experience as a composer writing music for reality television in LA for fourteen years. The genre of music I produced aimed to enhance specific narrative emotional registers that satisfied commercial standards. In these worlds, characters are set to inhabit a prescriptive set of emotional possibilities to entice the viewer into similar affective zones. I noticed how the codes and structures I was helping produce were also seeping into my body, manifesting themselves in my life. I became interested in how these products infiltrate our bodies and craft conforming ways of viewership, emotional possibility, and social behavior.
Transitioning between my role as composer to visual artist, I analyze and juggle the codes, formulas, and processes of television production and the entertainment industry. Entangling diverse mediums such as sculpture, video, and performance, I investigate how commercial media representation conspires to define identity, social interaction, and affective connections. I utilize production practices and elements such as sets, archetypal characters, scripts, cameras, and foley props as tools to conjure a critical playground and a space to decenter normative identities. By reenacting stories and re-mixing those production elements typically hidden from view, I try to ignite disruptions and slippages in the artifice of narrative. In doing so, the carefully crafted simulations of commercial media teeter, challenging the viewer’s comfort zones and the validity of what they are absorbing. As the surface of representation slowly shatters, new speculative languages and scenarios start to arise.
email: matthew@matthewmcgaughey.com phone: 310.622.3831