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.