Matt Roberts

Invasive Species Exhibition

Invasive Species is an ongoing series of photographs, animations, and augmented reality created from plastic debris along the Florida coastline. These works symbolize our interspecies entanglements with plastics, human activity, and the environment, and considers these entanglements as both highly problematic and rich in possibilities.

BodyCamObscura

BodyCamObscura replaces body camera surveillance technology with antiquated lensless cameras to subvert the intention of surveillance by translating surveilled information into abstraction. Made while walking with a pinhole camera strapped to the artist’s body, the project captures the duration of a dérive as one long exposure onto color film. Thus time, movement, light, and surveillance are compressed into a flattened and abstracted two-dimensional document: a photograph.

DashCamObscura

DashCamObscura replaces dashboard camera surveillance technology with antiquated lensless cameras to subvert the intention of surveillance by translating surveilled information into abstraction. Made while driving with a pinhole camera mounted to the dashboard, the project captures the duration of a dérive as one long exposure onto color film. Thus time, movement, light, and surveillance are compressed into a flattened and abstracted two-dimensional document: a photograph.

Florida Dreams

A photographic project that documents ubiquitous hand-painted murals found in the state of Florida. Realized as a set of postcards and prints, this series examines these idealized and grandiose representations of Florida lifestyle and nature. Preposterous, endearing, romanticized, discordant, unrealistic, absurd, sexist, disturbing, fascinating, beautiful, and hilarious: Florida Dreams.

Deadland

Deadland is the moniker of a small Florida town where I live. Taken at night, these photographs document abandoned businesses found throughout the Florida landscape–places once part of our daily routines, now empty shells of desire. These abandoned buildings surrounded by black stand as ghosts of progress, the remnants of capitalism.

View full album https://flic.kr/s/aHsmQ41xWq

Walking the Wrack line

Between January and August, new media artist Matt Roberts and poet Terri Witek traversed Canaveral National Seashore from the north boundary at Apollo Beach (New Smyrna) to the southern boundary at Playalinda Beach (Titusville). Their wanderings covered 24 miles of shoreline and an ever-changing wrack line. Roberts translated their experiences via video and still photography; Witek used text and voice: their collaborative show combines image, text, and sound in a site-specific installation at Canaveral’s historic Shultz-Leeper house (formally owned by artist Doris Leeper). Walking the Wrack Line is a cooperative venture: between Canaveral National Seashore, and Stetson University’s Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience, whose grant funded the project. In environmental terms, Walking the Wrack Line considers the interspecies entanglements we witnessed as both highly problematic and rich in possibilities. Philosophically, the wrack line reads like a long, connected treatise on both beauty and danger. As Dr. Wendy Anderson reminds us: “At a certain size, plastic and silica glint the same.” “Until you eat it,” adds Laura Henning, Chief of Interpretation and Visitor Service for Canaveral, pointing out how ocean and land continue both to toxify and sustain each other. As a visible reminder of how species interact, the wrack line has become, it seems to Roberts and Witek now, an EKG of our time on the planet.

Construction

These aerial photographs, made by deploying drone technology, show temporary marks left by the earth-moving equipment used to clear land for central Florida’s ever-sprawling housing developments. The photographs document tenuous moments between deforestation and soon-to-be constructed houses. These traces may be brief, but what they mark will be consequential and much more long lasting.

Drift

Drift:
A poetic record of ambles along the Florida coast. This series of work is made by walking without a final destination along the Florida coastline and recording each walk with a camera and GPS. The final reflection of each walk is realized as a mix of photographic prints, photogrammetry,video projection mapping, generative software and 3D printing.

Drift (Canaveral National Seashore)
archival pigment print 24”x91” & video projection, custom generative software, 3D print