Biography
Matt Mottel (born 1981, New York, NY) is an artist, performer and writer who enlivens primary source materials and creates collaborative artworks that amplify knowledge and provide access to subterranean culture. Social activism and cultural community are threads that run throughout Mottel’s extensive body of performances, videos, sculptures and music. Mottel’s comprehensive artistic foraging stems from his native New York upbringing.
His B.A. is in Political & Cultural Studies (SUNY New Paltz, 2003). He graduated from City College’s Digital Intermedia Art Practice program, receiving a M.F.A. in2019.
Mottel builds geodesic domes as a performance architecture based on Syeus Mottel’s (father) 1970’s photojournalism of Loisaida cultural organization CHARAS, who built geodesic domes in collaboration with Buckminster Fuller.
He is currently researching the 18th century era of the keytar and is also inspired by the 24 hour format that was HnH Bagels….
‘it's everything.’
Artist Statement
I research cultural histories and create inter-media environments for these extant forms.
I am musician who performs improvised and creative music, and hybrids of jazz, rock, punk, funk and psychedelia. Through the process of listening, and then choosing what to play, I am ‘'editing in real time.'
As a studio artist, I can use the skill of editing to make aesthetic decisions. I distill thematic interests into conceptual and abstract inter-media installation, performance and 2d and 3d objects.
The end result of my visual and inter-media artistic production must have clarity of intention.
The goal in both music performance and in visual art/installation is for the audience to disregard their presumed assumptions and then interpret and evaluate what they witness.
Mottel has presented work at the MoMA ,New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Kitchen, New York; Deitch Projects, New York; All Tomorrow's Parties Festival, London and Moers Music, Germany.
Recent invitations include Salzburg Summer Art Academy,Austria (2019); Mumei Art Space, Tokyo (2019); Pioneer Works (2018); mhPROJECT, NYC (2018); Loisaida Center, NYC. (2018); Situations Gallery, NYC (2017).
He has contributed articles for Art News (2019, 2017). Interviewed for The Brooklyn Rail (2017) and by writer Kembrew Mcleod as the epilogue to The Downtown Pop Underground (2018, Abrams Press), which closes with Mottel’s first person account of his artwork Levitation of Vice Media into the East River (2015).
In 2010, Mottel was selected by the ISSUE Project Room founder Suzanne Fiole as an Artist in Residence, and it was in this period that he developed an ongoing multimedia project that utilizes the cultural photography of his father, Syeus Mottel.
He was also an Residency Unlimited A.I.R. in 2010 (NYC), and Mottel was an Lower Manhattan Cultural Council A.I.R in 2011, collaborating with dance choreographer Karole Armitage.