2020, 47" x 29" x 1"
Medium: Algae, turmeric, chia seeds, keychain, plastic Continuing with my experimentation and research with clickbait, I conjoined the message with heraldry and vexillology, traditionally used to uncover ceremony, rank, and pedigree. This flag says, "7 ways hydration will change your life!" in a melted, gothic font and incorporates the supplements turmeric, chia seed, and Spirulina.
2020, 42" x 75" x 38"
Medium: Clay, beeswax, glass, wood, aluminum, pebbles, silicon Detailed shot of the glass elements and the joined candle sculpture.
2020, 42" x 75" x 38"
Medium: Clay, beeswax, glass, wood, aluminum, silicon Part of the "drinking: TEMPORARY PLEASURES" exhibition, this piece reflects my interest in regimented rest that acts as bookends to work. Organized like a burial, I created sculptural elements including a glass Venus figurine, face mask, and crushed can, hand-molded candles in a joined ceramic candelabra, and a clickbait silicon tablet. This silicon tablet cradled in the aluminum structure reads “what the media doesn’t want you to know about water (shocking).” This sentence plays with the everpresent fear of losing precious natural resources and the overall paranoia impeded in internet spaces.
2020, 65" x 33" x 48"
Medium: Algae, turmeric, chia seeds, silicon, muscle shirt, wig As part of the drinking: TEMPORARY PLEASURES exhibition, my collaborator, Cleo Miao, created the video, national fitness campaign, to be housed in my sculpture. Using a discarded clothing rack, I created a bodily sculpture that hung superfood garments. Miao's video relating to fitness propaganda in China inspired me to create a uniform from the products consumed in the health and wellness industry in the United States.
2020, Installation
drinking: TEMPORARY PLEASURES actively consumes and satirizes new forms of placebo and synthetic desires created for a gloomy Anthropocene. The exhibition creates chaotic meta-narratives exploring self-care in the context of advertisements, propaganda, and pleasure. It oscillates between intimacy and alienation through a series of virtual and material explorations by artists Miles Matis-Uzzo and Cleo Miao.
2021, 00:03:52, Media: Non-clay
This video uses footage that I shot in Joshua Tree during my artist residency at Otis College of Art and Design in 2019. With this work, I’m playing with portals of imagery relating to moss navigation, suntanning, the idiom “riding off into the sunset,” the American frontier mythology, and the murky borderland between history and myth. This was done by creating chroma-keying green objects that were shot at different angles and experimenting with various human interventions around Joshua Tree National Park.
2022, 10" x 6" x 8", Media: Stoneware, Firing Process: Electric, Surface: Glazed
Medium: Clay, poetry, sound, silk Detailed view of Shell No. 1: Scavenger’s Lullaby.
2022, 10" x 6" x 8", 7" x 4" x 5" , Media: Stoneware, Firing Process: Electric, Surface: Glazed
Medium: Clay, poetry, sound, silk As part of the exhibition, Washed Ashore at Fort Tilden. These ceramic sculptures ask the viewer to pick up and put the shell to their ear in order to hear the poetry soundscapes held within. Shell No. 1: Scavenger’s Lullaby and Shell No. 2: Commuting Ritual each contain a sound piece on a loop throughout the exhibition.
2022, 48" x 5" x 2", Media: Stoneware, Firing Process: Electric, Surface: Unglazed
Medium: Clay, keychains, Truck Nutz I created this piece as a self-portrait to speak about my body's relationship to my habitat. The carabiner holds a queer lineage that symbolizes the act of concealment and secret mutual recognition. As a trans person that juggles between gender expressions, the Truck Nutz symbolize my desire for masculinity and the keychains represent the ornamentation and customization of my body.
2022, 6" x 6" x 5" , 7" x 6" x 4", Media: Non-clay, Stoneware, Firing Process: Other, Surface: Non-ceramic
Medium: Scent, glass, installation Work for an in-progress installation called Morning Doom Bloom. I created two scents for each vessel: Scent I (for the amber vessel) is a burial fragrance to be found where my bones rest hundreds of years from now. Warm and genderless with notes of black pepper, honey, and rose complimented with leather, smoke, and wet earth. Scent II (for spiked datura vessel) is a scent for ecological catastrophe with notes of metal, smoke, and base notes of scorched flooded earth. Morning Doom Bloom will be a series of painted silk tapestries that guide the viewer as if they are excavating the ground. Among the maze of tapestries, there will be bodily glass vessels and sculptural pedestals.
Artist Statement
When I create art, I consider the state of our ecology and the subversion of binary structures of gender as they pertain to commerce, value, and performed labor. Through collaboration, performance, and sculpture, I address how the body and mind are shaped and mediated by cultural products and embodied knowledge.
My process includes research, intuitive practices, and material experimentation. I use visual language as a subversive tool and actively layer salvaged organic and inorganic materials to create bodily forms. The multi-media objects sit in the room like aging relics covered in a gooey film of our contemporary desires.
The current focus of my work is how we mimic and incorporate natural environments into our diet and life to achieve optimization of self and ego. I challenge these relationships and explore how we use fundamental organic materials, like honey, clay, and plant fibers, alongside ritual practices to achieve self-optimization and self-preservation. Some embodiments of escapism and self-preservation that exist within our gloomy Anthropocene take a form that is both humorous and terrifying. This feeling is incorporated into the work to demonstrate our ritualistic distancing from our diminishing ecosystem.
Bio
Miles Matis-Uzzo (they/them) is a Queens-based artist and superorganism that communicates through sculpture, poetry, video, performance, and installation. With these mediums, they excavate the products of gendered power structures, queer ecology, and the ritualistic distancing of our diminishing ecosystem. Matis-Uzzo has presented work at ICA/Boston, Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), The Anderson, Larrie, and Distillery Gallery among others. They have participated in residencies at Oxbow School of Art, NARS Foundation, and Otis College of Art and Design and were published in Studio Visit Magazine and HEADS Magazine.