Monday December 7 – Thursday December 10, 10:30pm PT
Matt Town: Online Screening & Artist Talk
In connection with his solo exhibition at the gallery
Artist Talk at 8:30pm ET
Microscope is very pleased to present an online screening of works in film and video by Matt Town, whose solo exhibition Depressions is currently on view at the gallery through December 20th (please note the exhibit has been extended). The screening will be followed by an artist talk and Q&A with Town.
The 50-minute program of works — shot on various formats including Super 8mm, 16mm, Hi8 video, cell phone, and HD video — by the artist includes mostly new works that have just been completed or that have not been shown before, with the addition of a few earlier works from 2012-13. The program relates to and expands upon his works presented in the exhibition about gun culture and the rituals of gun ownership in the US, which are also actual dialogues with several gun-owning friends and family members. Other works take the form of portraits of objects, people, places and other subjects as encountered in the artist’s daily life.
“TUNNEL” (2019) is an uncut shot of Town’s walk through the Burro Schmidt Tunnel in the Mojave Desert, recorded on 16mm film. It takes the artist about 9 minutes to wander through the half-mile hole that William “Burro” Schmidt spent 38 years digging with his own hands. The complete absence of light disorients the viewer and invites the imagination to picture the man at work in the tunnel, as well as the drive and effort needed to achieve his life’s purpose. Town’s “BURRO” (2017) documents Schmidt’s nearby home, which was equipped to endure violent winds.
The two new video works currently installed in the exhibit are included, as well: “ROOF” (2020) is a document of a life-long friendship and a seething condemnation of reckless gun ownership while “TRAP” (2019), which features Town and his father shooting a gun the artist’s sister gave their father as a gift, questions such traditional bonding rituals. The newly completed “How to Properly Destroy Firearms” (2020), records the destruction of a friend’s gun — the same featured in “ROOF” — that was recently fired indoors by someone who thought the gun was not loaded.
Earlier works in the program include the 16mm film “PROTEST” (2013), featuring a housing protest that took place in Bushwick, Brooklyn; “emancipate me” (2013), made with appropriated footage focusing on the use of baseball bats as weapons in both Hollywood blockbusters and televised sport; and the Super 8mm film “DENKMAL” (2012), a filmic and spacial exploration of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Germany.
TO WATCH:
A “WATCH NOW” link will appear on this page on Monday December 7th at 7pm ET. Passes for viewing give full access to the video program and live chat.
General admission $8 (Valid through Thursday December 10, 10:30pm ET)Member admission $6 (Valid through Thursday December 10, 10:30pm ET)
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Matt Town (b. 1989, Sarasota, Florida) is a Los Angeles-based artist working with moving image, photography, painting, installation and sculpture. His work is primarily concerned with a sense of community and one’s role within it and has appeared at Night Gallery, LA; The Box, LA; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Millennium Film Workshop, New York; Union Docs, New York; among others. In 2017 he was awarded a year-long CalArts REEF Residency. Matt Town received a BA in Film & Media Studies from the University of Florida in 2013 and an MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2017.
Program includes:
ROOF
By Matt Town, HD video, 2020, 2 minutes 50 seconds
“ROOF” is both a document of a life-long friendship and a seething condemnation of reckless gun ownership. The work combines video and photographic documentation of two gun incidents in his friend’s apartment taking place 10 years apart that put the artist’s and others’ lives in danger. The piece concludes with a collage of photos obtained from various formats including 35mm film developed at drug stores and images stored on iPods that Town traded with his friend since childhood, which parade across the screen similar to a memorial slideshow.
TRAP
By Matt Town, Hi8 video, 2019, 4 minutes 24 seconds
The 4 1/2 minute “TRAP” is a home movie made in 2018 that captures Town’s father teaching the artist how to shoot a shotgun for the first time at an outdoor range. The firearm, which had never previously been used, was a gift to Town’s father from the artist’s sister, who had tragically died earlier that year.
TUNNEL
By Matt Town, 16mm film to HD video, 2019, 10 minutes 20 seconds
In 1900, Burro Schmidt started to dig his life’s work, a giant 1/2 mile hole through the land he lived on, out the other side. It took him 38 years. He dug through a world war and the great depression. After failing to find gold, Schmidt could not stop, mining the hole with dynamite and digging with his bare hands. His body became deformed from the amount of time he spent hunched over in the dark, until he saw the light at the end of the tunnel.
BURRO
By Matt Town, HD video, 2017, 4 minutes 43 seconds
BURRO documents the home of William Henry “Burro” Schmidt, a man who dug a 1/2 mile long tunnel through a mountain over the course of 38 years in the Mojave desert. Violent winds are later blocked by decades worth of food packaging utilized as insulation. The aged and flattened boxes read as signs and an index of the past, nailed and tacked to the cabin walls.
4TH WALL
By Matt Town, 16mm film to HD video, 2019, 1 minutes 23 seconds
A tracking shot that documents the 1/4 mile I have walked everyday for the last 3 1/2 years at 4th and Wall street in Skid Row. The film features pairs of shoes, tied to parking meters, most of which I give to my neighbor Earl, who lives in the tent at the end of the block, as he wears the previous pair out. The film dramatizes this act of care.
emancipate me
By Matt Town, HD video, 2013, 3 minutes 40 seconds
A found footage film that cut and mixes Hollywood blockbusters featuring baseball bats used as weapons, with MLB dog piles, home runs, as well as a psychotic sermon from a radically conservative pastor at a super church staged inside a repurposed sports arena.
DENKMAL
By Matt Town, Super 8mm film to HD video, 2012, 1 minute 50 seconds
Documentation of the experience of watching people interact with the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. An abstract monument featuring formal, blank, cold pillars of concrete built on top of the Holocaust museum below.
PROTEST
By Matt Town, 16mm film to HD video, 2013, 1 minute 30 seconds
Documentation and eventually participation in a housing protest that took place in the tight knit Puerto Rican neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn, New York during early stages of gentrification. The documentation starts outside my then apartment on Greene Avenue, and continues onto the active Knickerbocker Ave.
FLAG
By Matt Town, Hi8 and HD video, 2020, 7 minutes
Conceived after questioning a family member’s confederate flag tattoo on their forearm, I decided to document the second largest confederate flag located just outside my hometown. The video studies the monument and it’s architecture, featuring small confederate flags on the electrical boxes for the watering system, signifying and powering this giant sprinkler of hate, as well as “Build the Wall” stickers with white supremacist websites listed on them, representative of the growing hatred and crumbling of America, which Trump has enabled. Later this year after the Black Lives Matter demonstrations the flag was thankfully taken down. The video, made in an ongoing series of home movies with my family’s Hi8 camera when I return home, or remotely through scripts and instructions, concludes with cellphone footage taken by my father, and sent to me, of a local news story covering the flag’s removal just months after we visited the monument. The most complicated and rewarding experience during the video’s production was my father pissing on the monument. He said he just needed to pee, but psychoanalyzing the action, I interpreted this as an acknowledgment of love towards me and my left politics, his rested unconscious.
How to Properly Destroy Firearms
By Matt Town, HD video, 2020, 11 minutes
The destruction of a friend’s shotgun in Florida.
TRT: 50 minutes
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Microscope Gallery Event Series 2020 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).