Caitlin Jane Mattia

The Future of Our Plans: SAIC Graduate Class of 2020

Graduates

The Future of Our Plans: SAIC Graduate Class of 2020

Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation

The work I’m currently making is so far from the work I’m presenting here, but I don’t know how to display a dream mid-form without crushing it. Awareness of where we are in the world necessitates major change and revisiting patterns of thought and actions. There will be a lot of making this summer, but not a lot of making that I feel the need to highlight right now and put on this platform. Instead, I will show snippets of what my work was like in grad school, removed from any MFA show plans, removed from how I’m considering the Now of it all.

balloon stepladder
Part of a series of vignettes. Using a step ladder I made out of balloons (looking for levity / balance / ways to be somewhere I’m not). The next version will be filled with helium. I’m finding, in isolation, renewed interest in the importance of the gesture.

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mattress project
Every night for a month, I went for a jog until I found a mattress or boxspring, and dragged it home with me. I tore each apart using no tool, only my body. I kept the wood. The final stage of this project will have me building a bench out of the wood, and placing it in front of a screen playing a video of the deconstructions.

cry rings

Rings with mounted sponge gemstones to soak up your tears. Many were made. They don't live in a gallery setting. They are given to anyone who claims to need one.

Candle Series selections: Burns at Both Ends; Stigmata Candle

A candle that burns at both ends (stills from a video of the candle in use); a candle that can't hold what would keep it warm and can't hang on to its own labor.

pot hole project

An ongoing project in which I go out at night and fill in potholes, leaving a mural on top. Stills from two of the multiple nights and an after-picture of one of the potholes. I'm trying to think more about the ways I take up space, and to leave something behind, and to care more for my relationship with what is around me. I'm aiming for my practice to be good to the places that nurture it, even if "good" only means an asphalt band-aid or a marker honoring the earth below. This place was here before we started calling it Chicago after purchasing lots out from under locals in 1833 and before it was given a city charter in 1837 and a lot of our streets break off from the grid system because they were there previously as trails formed by Native Americans, as paths ground out by animal herds in search of water.

husk project

In an investigation of self-preservation, self-help, working alone, and loneliness, I have been making saran-wrap and masking tape husks of myself and using them to complete tasks. Stills from early in my process here: completing a scene (willing it to animate after trying to teach it to be me); filming the Copy as a way to film myself while alone.

Projection
The first work I completed in my MFA program. A video that plays with identity and isolation, with audio that begins to fight itself and splits and splinters.

Ritual Prints
A short, looping animation of hand-washing dishes. Made using prints from copper etchings for each frame. One of a series of three looped moments of daily labor. The video is shown, unbending, over a pile of the prints that make it up, and anyone is welcome to take a print and walk away with a frame of labor.

My artist statement is being reconsidered, as at the start of the academic year I had a sudden greater awareness about what I was doing and where I was coming from, and how much survival and energy happened to be built in, but an earlier incarnation read:

My work considers the dichotomy between the constant movement of our molecules and our absolute need to make contact and comes solely from my own desire to know and be known. I make work about the impossibility of true connection but the beauty of the attempt despite this impossibility, and the humor within the sadness, and the ridiculousness of the mundane, and the mundane as a tool of communication itself. Everything ordinary is precious because it’s the language I have to know you by. I’m not sure I’ve reached you yet but I’m working on it. There is a tenderness and trauma and muchness to being a person in a body and trying to touch or connect with another, and I feel this especially, and find it particularly mistranslated, as a queer person in an assigned female body where what it means to connect and to understand might shift within the greater population.

I have been thinking a lot about the effort required to attain or strive for rest. I have been thinking about this as someone in an art school, which is a capitalist institution built around what could be considered an inherently socialist activity. I have been thinking about the work it takes to find balance, to go to sleep, to get to a point where you can stop working, to get to a moment of comfort. The constant influx of information that comes with connectivity twinned with consumerism. As a part of a generation accustomed to the word “hustle” as a life/work descriptor. As someone exhausted by the feeling of extraction I’ve been getting from so much of my practice – in film/video form (the eye that captures), and in usage of art materials (the destruction necessary for my own creation/artmaking), and in what it means for what’s around me (leaving behind detritus for someone to clean out of my attic when I’m dead, leaving behind stuff for the world to try to digest when it stops mattering to anyone, what it means to exist in an environment, to have contact with others). I’m interested in honoring the object, and in trust, and in trying to give as much as take.

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