MATT SHERIDAN PROJECTS

My monitor videos are objectified animations — experiences functioning as paintings. My animated video projections into and across architecture and sculptures are bodily experiential and structurally challenging, whether multi-channel, looped or live-mixed.

My work visualizes characteristics of, and conflicts between, collected energies from locations and consciousness — using scale, systematized color and iconically compressed marks in movement — to expand abstract painting’s options for action while confounding the order in how works appear to be made.

“Through a process of making physical paint marks, digitizing the marks, collaging the digitization, animating the collage, and projecting the animation onto a surface (both the white wall of a gallery and the outside of buildings have been utilized), the painting is thus liberated from the canvas and rendered alien. In Sheridan’s videos, multiple viewpoints present themselves at once: the digitized, the painterly, and the animate —alongside the comic (dancing, amputated legs), the somber (a soundless procession), the destructive (each painted line erases itself immediately upon completion), and the generative (a line gives birth to itself).”

 

— Sarah Wang, Liberated, Rendered Alien, liner notes for Trips, 2015

CURRY FOR CHAS

2018

Curry For Chas (three channel, 3 minute loop, 2018) transitioned into an expanded-length, full color work from a black and white version entitled Noodles for Tony. Sheridan’s summer of 2018 was bookended by the passing of Anthony Bourdain in June and his father Chas in September, which interrupted Sheridan’s production of this work. Sheridan worked to make something beautiful from conflicted feelings of loss and memory in a travel context memorializing his father (in full Keralan color) and Bourdain (in NYC black and white) in the travel context of Brisbane’s W Hotel.

CASTLES MADE OF SAND

2015

Castles Made of Sand is my first painting-in-motion collaboration incorporating both figuration and live video mixing into the projection. Animated painting moves were edited into processed footage of ballerinas filmed on Moreton Island with a RED video camera. This created a kind of “sand storm” becoming a technological environment at its highest state, eventually collapsing into the dunes from which it came as the dancers walk away down the ridge. This “warning” references the Jimi Hendrix track from which we borrowed the title.

VANISHING POINT

2015

Sheridan’s final painting-in-motion projection in Matsudo, Japan for his 2014-5 artist residency at PARADISE AIR was a 3 channel affair entitled Vanishing Point (Make Waves).  Presented across the unique facade of the Morita Clinic during a Friday night rush hour, Vanishing Point was also presented as a solo exhibition at GALLERY FAIR in Narita during which Sheridan projected 4 channels of video (one across the outer facade white cube, three inside the white cube of the gallery).

CONTOURS OF BELIEF

2014

Contours of Belief — a five channel painting-in-motion animation funded by an Audiovisual Grant from the Bahia Secretary of Culture (SECULT) — explores “spiritualized structuralism” in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil using video projections upon multiple architectural facades, in sync and in-the-round. Contours of Belief spotlights spiritual origins driving viewers’ orientation within the location itself while also sparking fresh perceptions about that ideology in the viewers both individually and within a larger group by turning the site into a third place — an imaginative space of painting, looped but in a continuous flux

CHASING TAIL

2012

Chasing Tail stretched possibilities for one animation video projection by inserting it into various global locations. The first location was the Chateau de la Napoule, Cote d’Azur, France in 2012. Chasing Tail is a double entendre: a circular motion performed by pets and slang for flirting with / hitting on / picking up sex partners. Movements generated from real paint marks and real paper folds sequenced and composited over time and into space. Then, it mutated from there.