matthew.works
Hometown: Milwaukee, WI
Visual Arts Category: Metalwork
Constructions of titanium, precious metals, & vitreous enamels. Everything fabricated by hand from scratch, no found objects. Basic aesthetic: Royal Dystopian. I create artifacts. Obscure purpose, lost history. Finding part of an ancient machine on a deserted beach is my kind of spiritual moment. While I don’t use actual “found objects” within my work, I emulate that sense of the almost familiar, but unknown. I picture my creations similarly being found by an yet-unknown culture in an uncertain future. I strive to create the artifacts that will be found and re-purposed; objects having their own evolution, including dead-ends, mistakes and miscalculations. The pieces may be functional in a Rube Goldberg-esque fashion… or purely dys-functional. A bit of fiction within the function, and function within the fiction.