Geronimo Projects

Matt Austin

For the holiday season, I have returned to my home of the last twenty odd years in the Great White North. While I am here, I will be focusing some really fantastic artists and friends of mine working in Chicago.

First up from the Midwestern Metropolis is Matt Austin, a fantastic photographer whose series Wake deals with personal struggles experienced by his family.



Geronimo Projects: How did you first become interested in photography?
Matt Austin: My younger brother, Jeff, first introduced me to “art photography.”
For the first 12 years of our lives, we passionately hated each other. Toward the end of my first year in college, he got in trouble with my mom because she read something he had written in his journal that she thought was inappropriate. So, as a punishment, he was then shipped to Iowa to spend time with me. I was studying Math Education in Davenport at a school called St. Ambrose University. I disliked almost every aspect of that first year of college with the exception of my Philosophy 101 course and a number of friends I had made. When my brother visited me, he had brought a camera with him and I asked him why he would need a camera to visit me in Iowa. He explained to me how a friend had gotten him interested in taking pictures and that he did it for fun, and I told him that was really weird. Because I had gone to a “college prep” high school, I had taken the opportunity of taking advanced courses of my choice that replaced the standard art classes. So, most art concepts were pretty foreign to me as I was pretty consumed with Calculus, Statistics, Physics, etc.
Anyways, at one point Jeff went out to take pictures on that visit and I went with him. He showed me how the camera worked and pointed out what he thought was interesting to photograph while I told him how much I hated Iowa. I had accumulated a good amount of money in Iowa from playing poker in the dorms and tutoring Calc to other students. A few weeks after my brother visited, I used that money to buy a camera at a big discount because my friend worked at Best Buy. I began taking pictures on my own and would show them to my brother whenever I saw him. On another visit of his (we had stopped hating each other at this point), he suggested that I check out the Columbia College open house because he was going that weekend and he said it looked cool, so I went with him. Having no art background (with the exception of grade school classes), I didn’t have much directed interest when I went to it; however, the first sentence of the opening lecture was “we’re not like any Iowa schools,” which was enough for me to drop my life in Iowa and try out art things. I started as a Graphic Design major because my mom works in design and I thought the genes would pass down some talent but it took me a week to realize that wasn’t necessarily true. But being that a pre-requisite class for Graphic Design majors is Photography, the switch happened naturally.



GP: Tell me about your series Wake.
MA: Wake is part of a body of work involving my family that has taken a few different forms and is still evolving; I’ve included a few very recent photos in this grouping.
It is a photographic narrative about a number of tragic experiences that have happened within the circle of people that I consider family. It began in 2008 with my dad being evicted from his apartment while I had just arrived in Ireland to study abroad for 6 months. The project began then as simply e-mails and photos exchanged between my dad and I while I was living abroad. Eventually that interaction came to form as an installation made from tarps that my dad had used to protect his belongings from the rain on the day he got evicted. Inside the room made out of tarps was a projection of cell phone pictures he had made on the day of the eviction, along with an audio piece of my brother and I reading aloud from the e-mails that my dad and I had written to each other since that day. This installation was shown in the Burren College of Art gallery in Ireland and then later at the Co-Prosperity Sphere in the “Transparent Reflect” show that was curated by Caitlin Arnold and Aron Gent. After returning home from Ireland, I had been making photographs of my dad and I embracing each other in different locations of tragic memory, and I included the one of us hugging at the site of the eviction in the “Transparent Reflect” show.
I continued that series of hugging photographs until I’d made about 12 or so and then I began just intuitively photographing my family without any real direction. Shorty after I began taking that direction with the work, my mom’s boyfriend Richie was diagnosed with several types of cancer. I was consistently going out to Schiller Park to spend as much time with Richie and my mom as I could. It was through these experiences that I met Uncle Joe, a 90 year-old man who was one of Richie’s father’s best friends. Uncle Joe and I got along really well but I only got the chance to have two encounters with him before he passed away that October. A few weeks after Uncle Joe’s wake, we got news from that my cousin Mark who I had grown up with in Buffalo was killed in a car accident at the age of 19. I think it was at that point that I didn’t really think I’d be using any of my photographs or writing for anything but the therapy that they were giving me throughout this disorienting series of months. My parents and my brother got in a car hours after we found out about Mark and drove together to Buffalo for Mark’s wake and funeral. That next January, Richie passed away.
Although the work embodies truly saddening events, I did find certain positive revelations emerge from these difficult times. The experience of looking at these different kinds of deaths (expected, unexpected, physical, economic, young, old) also served as a kind of reorganization of priorities. It sometimes takes these difficult times to remind you of how you should be spending your energy. I think that’s why Wake is a pretty fitting title. It’s both an explanation for the type of document that it is, a reflection on past ideas based on tragic occurrences, but it also serves as a wake-up for what it means to be living.



GP: The subject matter of Wake is obviously extremely personal. Have you faced any challenges in making such an intimate subject matter accessible to your viewers?
MA: It is a very personal project. I was really hesitant to show it to the majority of my family at first, mainly because of the fear of upsetting anyone. But then when I finally did, it was actually received really well. When I gave the first copy to my mom, she ended up reading the whole thing aloud to my grandma over the phone. Of course, they went through bouts of tears (and also laughter), but they both really like the book. My dad has supported me through this whole experience as well. He’s told me about his appreciation for the work based in the more accurate representation of our economy than the statistics he hears in the news all the time that are talking about him and his situation (such as 13.4 million people unemployed, 14% unemployment rate, etc.); all of them being numbers that can’t be visualized or understood in any directly relatable way.
In terms of making the personal content accessible, I think it’s arguable that the main topics of the book are most likely also pertinent to your life. As long as you are alive right now somewhere in the world and participate in a culture, you probably have some sense of the what is happening to the concept of money and its function in your society; and you also probably know that someday you will die.
My intention with making the book so personal in terms of the descriptive elements coming from my own perspective is part of a conscious effort to share my own vulnerabilities with the additional risk of my family being comfortable with that or not. I believe that it is part of being human that people benefit from relating to one another. In this case, I hope that the sharing of our story can positively affect a person who reads it.



GP: Wake is presented as a series of prints and text contained in a box. What does the text contain and how does it further the content?
MA: The text is roughly half of the book, though I think most people tend to just look at the photographs – which is also just fine. The text comprises excerpts from my dad’s e-mails to me after he was evicted as well as a number of journal entries of my own throughout these various experiences. I think the text mainly functions as a narration; it reminds you that it is through my perspective that you are accessing the story.
I think some of the abstracted photographs are more successful when having read the text and I think the entire story comes together much better when reading the text. There are a number of photographs that create a dialogue with concepts within the writing.



GP: How did you reach the decision to display wake as a series of unbound pages within a box?
MA: Originally, the idea for that was a bit too conceptual. I’ll admit to that.
I just enjoyed what the function of that aesthetic decision was; you tend to be far more delicate and careful with your hands even though it’s not very necessary and you are forced to pay attention to how you are going to organize the pages once you’ve finished looking at them; and then when you’re done, you need to close a lid which I wanted to reference a casket. I just thought it inserted a kind of awareness of your self while looking at this story.
However, the response to this design in various exhibitions has been, in a way, cranky. In that the extra effort needed to experience the book in this way (slightly more difficult than turning the page of a bound book) is apparently upsetting enough to no longer be interested in experiencing the work whatsoever. Unfortunately for that design, it’s more important to me that people experience the work than for the original concept to stay. So, I’m currently developing a newer design with the same clamshell gray box that will house two smaller bound books dividing the work into two parts; which I’m actually really excited about.



GP: You recently made a series of zines. Talk about the process and the subject matter. Were the zines informed by your work on Wake?
MA: The zines were a complete departure from Wake.
If this part of my photography career was personified into early Bob Dylan (circa 1960), “Wake” would be his first self-titled album and the zines would be three different songs from the “Folksinger’s Choice Radio show” that aired right before he released the album. They’re good songs, but not very comparable or of much relation to what happens afterward; they’re just little parts that help you understand him as a person and cool to listen to every once and awhile.
With that said, the zines began as small ideas that build up in my head that sometimes need to get out. And the reason why they build up is because they don’t really “fit” into any of the other bigger projects that are on the forefront, so they get pushed to the back of the priority list. So I just started to put them together mainly because I wanted to work on something new and more uplifting.



Desert Days is a zine comprised of the only writing I managed to put down while I was at Burning Man for my first year there, along with a number of photographs that I had made on the trip to the Black Rock desert, in the Black Rock desert, and on the way back.



Try to be more positive is a zine made out of a bunch of impulsive photographs that happen as result of me bringing a camera with me wherever I go. Also, at the time of making the zine, every time I would show my mom new pictures she would tell me to try be more positive with my photography because she thought the pictures were depressing. So, one breakfast with Mom, I secretly recorded her saying that and her giving me advice on how I could accomplish that. So the zine is made up of my depressing photographs and my mom’s words of positive encouragement.



Freedom Isn’t Free is the largest zine in size and quantity of photographs. It’s a stack of twenty-seven 5.5 x 7 postcard-like prints wrapped in a glassine envelope that you would inevitably rip when trying to open it. This zine was intended to be a very sarcastic interpretation of how we’ve been guided to experience new things in America. I stopped printing this zine because it became unaffordable after using so much paper, ink, and time to produce such a small quantity; but I’m brainstorming ways of re-releasing it with a new design. I want them to be actually mailable as postcards.
I then came up with the idea that I wanted to go on a really long trip alone and make a project out of learning from scaring the shit out of myself. And I also thought that promoting these zines would help fund the trip, which did help out a lot. Although a fair amount of credit for the zine sales should go to organizations such as the Indie Photobook Library paired with the ability of effortlessly sharing the word on Facebook and blogs. Those things got the word pretty far out there.
Also, a bit of advice regarding the zines:
I strongly encourage any photobook or photo-zine artist to mail copies of their work to the iPL; it has helped my work get to people that I would have never been able to access otherwise, Larissa Leclair is a genius and a saint.



GP: Who are some of your major influences?
MA: Theoretically: Bob Dylan, Jean Paul Sartre, Allan Kaprow, Bill Brown, Charles Spearin, Kevin Drew.
Realistically: My brother, my mom and dad, Anna Shteynshleyger, Brian Ulrich, Mary Farmilant, Larissa Leclair, Myra Greene, Dawoud Bey, Simon Anderson, Trevor McNaughton,Victor Yañez, Riley Henderson, EJ Hill, Daniel Shea, Anna Cerniglia, Caitlin Arnold, Aron Gent, Justin Schmitz, Jennifer Keats, and the people of the ACRE artist residency.



GP: How important is Chicago and it’s art community to your work?
MA: This is an appropriate follow-up question to my list of influences being mostly participants in the Chicago art community.
Though a lot of the work I make doesn’t actually happen in Chicago, I think that my abilities of understanding and talking about my own work has a lot to do with my home environment. The unbelievable collection of minds within the Chicago art community allows for a consistent flow of intellectual conversation. I think that participating in the situation of being surrounded by these people inherently progresses our development as artists and as people sharing a community. It helps to look around you and mostly see people pushing themselves to some degree of discomfort, but only because they love what they do. I also think that this has always been the case, but the ACRE Artist Residency crew is taking that knowledge and is kind of hitting the rest of Chicago with it really hard.



GP: What does the future hold for Matt Austin?
MA: For now, it is my goal to never have a job that I hate ever again.
I currently teach Digital Photography at Jones College Prep and will be continuing that this Summer and next year, hopefully taking on a similar position at another high school. I also will continue regularly tutoring Math at the 8th grade level and assisting various photographers whenever those magical opportunities appear out of nowhere.
In March of 2011, I have a solo show at Johalla Projects through the ACRE exhibitions.
I’ve also been playing music a lot; and my brother, EJ Hill, and I are thinking about getting a van and putting together a road trip/tour at some point.
I’m also currently collaborating with a really wonderful writer, Hutch Hutchinson, on making a collection of romantic fictional letters and photographs that we hope to release on Valentine’s Day of 2011.
And I’ve been discussing some pedagogical ideas involving experimental education with Brandon Alvendia that will hopefully come to life this upcoming Summer.



GP: What’s on your playlist? Who do you listen to most?
MA: I do my best with matching music with the weather.
Right now, I’m working with:
Akron/Family – Akron/Family
Kurt Vile - God Is Saying This to You
Lateduster - Easy Pieces
Ray Charles - Birth of the Soul
Do Make Say Think - You, You’re a History in Rust
Kevin Drew - Spirit If…
also, my brother’s recently recorded album. The band is called A(a)rdvark.



http://mattaustinphoto.com/
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