Matthew Mazzotta
Residency period
8 November 2014 – 31 January 2015
About
Matthew Mazzotta works in a transdisciplinary fashion, collaborating with local labourers, academics, engineers, builders, community members, activists, artists, poets, and anyone else who is willing to be involved in something experiential and participatory. These socially-engaged interventions allow for a re-entry of the physical and metaphorical landscapes of our lives by provoking conversations around exploring the local, questions of ecology, public involvement, community building, artist sensibilities, science and dissecting the systems that make up our ‘everyday’. His work attempts to reverse the top down one-way exchange of ideas and allowing people to contribute in a more tangible way to their own environment. Matthew received an undergraduate degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Masters of Science in Visual studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he now teaches at MIT’s Pro-gramme in Art, Culture and Technology. In 2014 Mazzotta was the recipient of the Chamerlain award by the Headlands Centre for the Arts, San Francisco.
Focus
Matthew Mazzotta’s work evolves from an interest in exploring the relationship between people and their environments, as well as between each other. His practice manifests as participatory public interventions that aim at bringing criticality and a sense of openness to notions of public space and sculpture. Mazzotta recreated his community-specific Public Art project in the form of Outdoor Living Room at a hawker centre in Tiong Bahru, Singapore.
His research also involves looking at the different possibilities and limits of public space and public artwork in Singapore.