Part of Winter 2003
Presented with the support of the Media City Festival, Windsor (February 12 – 15 www.houseoftoast.ca)
Matt McCormick’s recent video The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal has won international accolades for its dreamily tongue-in-cheek exposé of an art movement so counterculture it doesn’t even know it exists. To assume, however, that this single piece is a summation of McCormick’s stylistic arsenal would be a grave underestimation as this collection of his film and video will show.
An oeuvre which reinvents its approach with each successive entry, McCormick’s body of work is unified by its ongoing investigation of detritus – urban, cinematic, televisual, and emotional. Whether wielding an apocalyptic hole-punch on 16mm film (The Vyrotonin Decision), transforming found footage of a polar bear and a beauty queen into a heartbreaking evocation of unrequited love (Sincerely, Joe P. Bear), or transfiguring state-sponsored urban dullification into transcendental irony (The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal), he gives castaway images and ignored landscapes a chance to speak with new voices. Always hip and entertaining, but never less than sincere these movies show that no shred of celluloid is too orphaned, no corner too dingy, to be elevated to the plane of beauty.
