Monday, December 5 - 8PM Matthew Mottel presents
Mottel : mottel ; the image is a seed - student edition I
Image is a Seed is an ongoing artwork that combines the Syeus Mottel photography archive with new media made by current artists. Much of the archive is uncirculated and has not been seen by anyone in decades. By choosing a collaborative format, Prof. Mottel breathes new life into the photography work of his father inviting peers and students to respond with their own interpretations to the images of political and everyday moments of the 1960s and 1970s. Matthew Mottel also creates his own biographical work by connecting generational memory, as in the 2022 installment of the piece, The Image is a (Sydny) Seed. A work where he is the prism of reflection between his newborn son and late father. This body of work has been exhibited in galleries, online broadcasts, and in live performance internationally.
Professor Matt Mottel has encouraged his students at New Jersey City University to make Digital Media Art that combines found footage of their hometown neighborhoods, along with digitally animated GIF Art from their family archives, with a soundtrack of their choice.
Links:
https://mhprojectnyc.com/Mottel_Mottel
Syeus Mottel (1930-2014, New York, NY) was a theater director and photographer, notable for his documentation of Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio and Buckminster Fuller. Syeus defined his photography as “diaristic”: he shot the people he encountered including John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, Martin Luther King Jr., William S. Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Miles Davis, Patti Smith, Vito Acconci, Robert Rauschenberg and Diane Arbus. In 1973, Syeus published Charas, the Improbable Dome Builders, about the Lower East Side community organization CHARAS, who had been experimenting with Buckminster Fuller’s and other’s ideas to build inexpensive housing on vacant land on the Lower East Side. The book was re-published in 2017 by Song Cave Press and Pioneer Works. Matthew Mottel wrote an accompanying essay that appeared in Art News Magazine in December 2017. Syeus’s photographs were the subject of his first solo show at Situations gallery, New York in 2017
Matthew Mottel (born 1981, New York, NY) is an artist, performer and writer. Matthew researches political and cultural histories to ameliorate the relationships between archival historical documents and their contemporary context. These investigations often are in the form of sculpture, intermedia art installation and performance; creating unique environments for archival media to exist within. Matthew was an Artist In Residence At Issue Project Room in 2010 and an LMCC Swing Space Recipient in 2011. He has presented work at the Museum of Modern Art, 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. He received his B.A at SUNY New Paltz, with a degree in Political & Cultural Studies in 2003. He presented his thesis exhibition towards an M.F.A. at City College’s DIgital Intermedia Art Practice program in 2018.