Matt Stock
The appearance of an absent body.
Matt Stock has developed a system of extended projections that augment the defined boarders of the video experience. Binocular vision, and the wandering gaze of the viewer are absorbed into his video objects at the same time that the right-angled sovereignty of the filmed format is rejected. His video works redouble the instability of the reconstituted movie scene and bring to the fore the possibilities of revealing three-dimensional experience through a two dimensional medium.
Matt Stock fixes multiple cameras onto himself with a specially designed jacket. These cameras range from small low specification wireless cameras, of 320/240 TV lines, to wide-angle DV cameras. The cameras are never handheld, but always set into his suited exoskeleton. With this equipment, he walks circuits through different parts of cities preparing choreographed circles from which he cuts his video loops. The layering, overlapping, and delaying of footage tends to obliterate the bodies and architecture caught in them. Through the jumps and twitches of the inconstant wireless signal, everything is transformed into the looming myopic forms of a frustrated three-dimensional vision.
We follow the spiralling work like a detective novel without crime, motive or opportunity. Here there is an echo of Beckett's minimalism and his fascination with precise but troublesome movement. Throughout Stock's works, despite their intense colour and fluid transparent surfaces, there is the bulging invisible mass of the human body. As in any good crime novel you always need a corps and this one is accompanying us in our search for the body.
Either through the anti-letterbox handling of projectors, or the double presentation of the same scene through different cameras, the act of presenting the work completes the work in the same space as the viewer. The body frames the visual experience; both the artist's and the viewers presence is implicated. The nonalignment of projectors to the building and walls denies and transplants the dominance of architecture. There is an attempt through the 'screening phase' of the film, to accommodate and translate information in the 'shooting phase'. The production flow of a video or film is constantly brought back into the present as it endlessly attempts to map its own inquiry.
The works are also a portrait of the city. Not as layers of architecture and demolition or cultures and memories, but as a conglomeration of transports and flows. Not static buildings, but ways of moving and storing; economies and assets. The absent body is always located between walls by the lenses of Matt Stock's cameras. His work does not reflect our concerted attempt at seeing or experiencing or even knowing the city as an entity but reveals an uneasy difficulty at the heart of any such attempt. Here we have the situation where instead of a community finding ways in which to perceive the city, it is the city that perceives itself through the community that lives within it.
