Matt Allison
Volume: Where do you live / where do you work?
Matt Allison: I live in Los Angeles, CA with my wife and creative partner Katie. The answer to “where do I work” is a bit trickier: I spend about a 1/3 of the year traveling the U.S. for work, so a piece rarely begins and ends in the same place. Add the fact that walking is an integral part of my practice (both as a research tool and as a mode of production) and my answer to the question “where do I work” is “a little bit of everywhere.”
Can you give a quick description of your work space?
It’s 12ft x 20ft space on the 5th floor of a historic garment building in downtown Los Angeles. It serves equally as my studio, a production space for our creative services company MNK Studio, and headquarters for Sea Farm City.
What’s your day to day studio schedule like?
My studio schedule varies wildly based on what time of year it is. Several wonderful weeks of working 9am-5pm in the studio are usually followed by months of being confined to my laptop while on a plane or a hotel bar. That might be followed by travel for a Sea Farm City project, then back out for our client work… I’m enormously grateful to be in this situation, but I’ll admit that maintaining my studio practice requires a lot of patience and a super organized planner. (As I’m sure it does for most people.)
Who’s work have you been looking at lately?
People I know: The Center for Imaginative Research and Cartography. People I don’t know: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Carol Bove, and Bill Bollinger
What museums or galleries do you visit regularly?
I’ve visited the Hammer quite a few times in the last year, and anytime I’m in the Bay Area I make sure to stop by Yerba Buena. As for as smaller spaces go, Monte Vista Projects in LA is a personal favorite.
What was the last show you saw in person that impacted your work?
William Pope L’s Trinket at MOCA last year was an incredible display of the way scale can be subversively politicized. Having a 50ft long flag blowing itself apart is impressive, but to command an entire wing of a museum with just a few decomposing onions? That was the real display of power. The installation reconfirmed that the scale of a work isn’t always determined by its physical edges.
What do you do when you’re not working, and how does that impact the artwork that you make…? What influences your practice outside of the studio?
The vast majority of my influence comes from things outside of the art world. It’s always been that way for me, going back to an early obsession with Rauschenberg and his Combines. As a youngster, I responded more to the “everyday” in them than I did the “art” side of them. I’ve been trying to find new ways to access my own “everyday” ever since.
I think it’s really important for artists to diversify their points of reference. I see the arts community (at least the small portion of it that I operate in) as a big, ongoing conversation between artists, spaces, artists who run spaces, curators, artists who curate, the occasional writer, etc… And I can’t think of anything less creative than a conversation where everyone is talking about the same thing.
So… a few recent “non-art” related influences have been: the videos of Bill Strobeck, the city of New Orleans (past, present, future;) the vines that constantly threaten to over take my garden; and our country’s mental health epidemic.
Any upcoming projects or residencies in the near future?
Yes! Sea Farm City will be hosting “Open House/ Expanded Flat” on August 27th for Maiden LA and I’m collaborating with my dear friend Matthew Usinowicz on a show at OMAS opens in November.
Thanks to Matt Allison for answering our questions. More images and information on his work can be found at www.mattallsionprojects.com
Information on Sea Farm City is at: www.seafarmcity.com
For more Information on Open House / Expanded Flat visit: www.seafarmcity.com
MNK Studio is at Facebook:@MNKstudio