Matt Weedman BKT Assistant Professor of Art
Recently tenured professor Matt Weedman describes his academic interests as “broad and insatiable,” but most of his research is in performance and installation-based art, much of which uses photography and video.
If you look at both of these, there’s just this kind of art deco-style. The objects suggest a certain amount of power and technology with the design. You know they are just junk electronics, but there is something about the outside’s perfect design with the chrome that makes you think of space.
These are from the 1940s. You have the nuclear family which was Mom and Dad and two-and-a-half kids. There’s this suggestion of an ideal family of America. They’re all just homogenized in ways that are intentional, like with the family being white. But there are also features that are unintentional like the pink on the dad’s face. The ink that they used didn’t fare well over time, and started running on their faces.
The Roll Monica
The harmonica is just utterly fantastic. It’s basically a player piano harmonica. You roll paper inside and blow through the harmonica, hitting the holes of the paper to play a tune for you. It’s so ridiculous, yet so beautiful and fantastic that someone would make something like this for somebody who doesn’t have the time or interest to play a harmonica. They could still live that fantasy and play with this.
This was my dad’s childhood desk. I believe it was made by a family member and has survived through generations. I remember drawing on here and figuring things out. When I was a nanny to my goddaughter, she would draw on it and now my kids draw on it.
Miniature shoes
I always pick up anything that is odd. These are all salesman samples of a new style of shoe that they were trying to sell door-to-door. The miniature shoes would be left behind, kind of like how a company today hands out its business card. They commodify success, or the idea of success and that this is a shoe that says it will solve all your problems, like a special pill. It’s a beautiful little thing.
I started making artwork when I was an undergrad, and I was always doing something with my feet. It became an allusion to the feeling of not feeling complete, a little bit broken—not so much in a sense of brokenhearted, but as a masculinity issue. Figuring out how to be a man was just an awkward and bizarre concept to me.
This reminds me the most of being a magician. I got this at the magic store in Champaign, Illinois, where I worked as a kid. That magic store was the pivot point in my life. My father died when I was 10, and he was interested in magic. I jumped into it hardcore after he died. There were two men who ran that magic shop and they became fatherly figures for me—the symbol of what makes a good man that I pattern myself after. There would be very little of me without working in that magic shop.
I performed my first magic show for money when I was eight years old and I did that until I was 16. I did everything, and not just the basic card tricks. I remember when I was 12, I would get paid $15 to perform magic at events like ladies’ luncheons. I would eat razor blades, juggle daggers, stick needles in my arms, have people shoot a bullet dart gun at me and I would catch the bullet between my teeth. I was ridiculous, completely inappropriate and also wonderful.
Growing up in that community with other magicians was so bizarre and exciting for me.
Magic, to me, is everything. By 13 I stopped doing schoolwork and worked on magic full-time. All I knew was magic, and I was pretty good. Magic gave me this understanding of the world that I needed to figure out more and started this drive of who I am as an artist.
The Magazine of Light
I’m interested in electricity, and just love the aesthetics of it. This whole magazine was a promotional tool, but it is so interesting to think that somebody back then was holding this magazine and thinking, Wow, this is going to be the future. Now we’re in the future and everything is digital, and electricity is similar to the internet.