7x7x7 Series: Matt Shelton
Matt Shelton is the fifth featured artist in our sixth 7x7x7 Series, which asks 7 questions to 7 Charlottesville artists and is published once a week for 7 weeks. Artist interviews and studio visits were conducted by our summer intern, Kalista Diamantopoulos. Photos were taken by Benita Mayo.
This summer's series is presented by The Seven Society and features artists affiliated with the University of Virginia.
Photo Credit: Benita Mayo
Intro written by Kalista Diamantopoulos. Published September 7, 2022.
It was a still and quiet morning at Visible Records and artist and art teacher Matt Shelton was at his studio with his 6-year old daughter Clare. Upon arriving, Clare scanned the floor of the studio and declared that it was messy. Matt explained that he doesn’t clean up messes immediately because he doesn’t know yet if they are messes or if they are actually art.
Matt’s studio is a small space, which he says helps to keep him from moving all of his art materials to the studio. Spread over a corner of this space is a tan tarp which peeks out from under various sheets of crinkled paper, loose fragments of paper pulp, a cardboard box of Civil War era magazines, a blender, a paper shredder, and a water jug and baby bath bassinet repurposed as a bucket and strainer respectively.
Leaning against the lower left corner of the wall is a square mirror reflecting back the miscellaneous objects scattered on the floor. On the upper right corner of the wall is a paper pulp outline of the Roses Discount Store logo — a logo that holds nostalgic significance for him and his childhood growing up in North Carolina. His local Roses store, nestled where ‘city meets country,’ was where he first experienced consumption and consumerism — and where he bought his first CD player.
Currently, Matt is working with Civil War magazines which he is grinding to a mushy pulp with a paper shredder and blender. While doing so, he is thinking about their relation to the removal of monuments and statues. By grinding the magazines, he is not necessarily destroying the history but rather rendering it illegible, invisible.
Simultaneously, Matt is also contemplating how to not only look back at history but to look forward as well. It is no wonder that in doing so, he is deriving inspiration from youth, especially his daughter. Matt rummaged around a box and pulled out a few of her drawings she had made for him, describing with awe and admiration how energetic and wild they were. Looking ahead, he is hoping to incorporate some of her work and style into his own practice.
1. Describe what you are currently working on?
Right now my routine is to hold internal “office hours” while taking long walks in the morning, take care of an errand or chore and eat lunch, then try to get in the studio for a few hours daily. During that walking time I’m recording voice memos or videos, listening to audiobooks, taking notes on my phone. All the reading relates to the studio processes and questions right now. So I’ll listen to the book with a physical copy in my backpack, so I can mark passages that really resonate.
One of the books I’m working through this summer is Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans: Race and the memory of evil, which Isabel Wilkerson references in her book Caste. Neiman is a Georgia-raised American philosopher who’s lived in Berlin for decades. She synthesizes a lot of post-war German politics, history and philosophy to describe how Germans have attempted to both confront and escape their history, and holds it up as an imperfect but absolutely necessary and in many ways admirable model of how a society can take responsibility for its past. I’m also slowly making my way through Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score, in which he discusses the ways in which trauma lives in the body and how it can be resolved or addressed through various somatic practices: EMDR, qi gong, yoga, dance, etc.
So I’m taking in this information and then later I go to the studio where I’ve been pulping a collection of near-mint 1972-1985 issues of the magazine Civil War Times Illustrated that I reluctantly inherited from Pawpaw, my dad’s dad, who died in 2015. I started pulping the magazines not long after I got them in 2013-14. I was trying to find a way to “get rid of it” without actually dumping it. I’m not really sure why I’m doing it, but trying to get out of my own way to recognize and honor the tendency to let go mindfully, tenderly feels important. Over the years I’ve conceptualized the impulse to pulp this arguably worthless bequest in many ways: as fracking the calcified memory of the past; as a zero-loss reshuffling or reordering the magazines on a granular level; as accelerated composting; as material metaphors for the emotional opacity of my father and his father, which felt indistinguishable from the place and landscape of rural northwest NC where I grew up. Lately I’ve been applying the pulp directly to the wall, where it dries and binds to the surface through its sizing (glue) that’s part of the paper. I’ve been experimenting with applying it through a plastic stencil with mixed results. I often wish I could move on more quickly but the work seems to think it has more yet to teach me.
2. What is your ideal creative environment?
Porous. Holistic. These words come to mind, but I’m not sure I think an ideal creative environment exists, because I think all people are creative all the time in one way or another. It reminds me of that Louis Armstrong quote about all music being folk music.
Maybe the ideal creative environment would be one where having time to cultivate an inner life or pursue unprofitable ideas wasn’t a privilege, but an unnamed expectation.
Visible [Records] is pretty great. But that takes a ton of intentionality and work and shared vision on the parts of Morgan Ashcom and Kendall King, who run the space. It’s so affirming and welcoming, and that has everything to do with the priorities they set and reaffirm every day.
Photo credit: Benita Mayo
3. How has Charlottesville impacted your artistic work and life as an artist?
Em and I moved to Charlottesville from Richmond in 2014, and it’s been invigorating to see and feel how the national consciousness-raising around anti-Blackness and white supremacy has played out vis a vis our local contention with Monticello and monuments. There is no way out but through. Remember what the spring and summer of 2017 felt like? It was tense. That summer I flicked off a white pickup streaming double Confederate flags from its bed after passing it on Meade, and dude did an immediate U-turn and tried to follow me to my house.
A lifetime ago, we lived in Greensboro, which lived in the shadow of the Klan-Nazi murders of five labor organizers in 1979. 2017 felt scarily similar to what I’d learned about the build up to that “Greensboro Massacre”— the mutual antagonism of groups, the conspicuous disengagement of local law enforcement, the widespread contempt for antiracist organizers that allows many white citizens to claim “outside agitators!” and therein absolve themselves of any implication in the generational violence that precedes such tension.
After that we lived in New Orleans post-Katrina, and I remember laying on my back porch after a run one afternoon, looking at the sky, thinking about what a privilege it was to live in a place where everyone I knew was obsessed with thinking about the kind of world they wanted to live in.
So Charlottesville now feels like both of these things — the tension, the recalcitrance, but also the visioning — the space for which has been cleared by activists and civic leaders like Zyahna Bryant, Andrea Douglas, Jalane Schmidt. So many more. The vision of the George Rogers Clark monument with that welded scar around its neck comes to mind. The place with a monument praising white dominion over the “savage” is also the place where that guy’s head gets sawed off is also the place that reattaches the head like some historical Frankenstein is also the place that (finally) removes that monument.
I say all this to preface the fact that in my work I often feel like I’m doing this pendulous swing between terror and imagination. And I feel like my art practice is where I try to catch some of the more philosophical, ponderous and self-destructive off-gassing of that experience of living between contesting narratives.
4. What frustrates you as an artist?
My brain. My personality. My apparent inability to get out of my own head. My fear of failure. My desire to be liked.
5. How do you manage a work-life balance as an artist?
I manage it by trying to remember that I’m always an artist, whether I’m actively “making art” at that moment or not. I actually think the “not art” time is really important and productive for me. I’m teaching, I’m following the news, listening to an audiobook while I clean the house — I end up kind of accidentally pitching ideas to myself during this time, and that motivates me to take intentional time to make things, try things out. As a parent of young kids, especially, and especially with the stop-start/manic nature of parenting during a pandemic, I think I understand the feeling of imbalance, of feeling like I can’t get away. Often I can’t attend to the time and space and energy it takes to kind of dissolve into and re-emerge from solitude, which making art really demands of me, for better and worse. It’s hard to shift gears. It’s a huge energy conversion, to go from home to the studio. It’s like trying to go down a really steep hill in low gear.
A brilliant friend of mine who’s a high school science teacher in North Carolina says having kids is like watching your heart run around outside your body. I love that. But while that is a beautiful and apt metaphor, it also reflects the spiritual/psychic toll it can take — like, if your heart’s outside your body, you gotta be careful, you know? It makes me kind of vigilant and passively threat-assess constantly: “Is this one ever going to learn how to say they’re sorry? Is that one going to fall off the table they’re dancing on right now? Was that sniffle COVID?” And I think making art, on the other hand, really wants permeability, vulnerability, questioning. You have to be safe enough to fail, a lot, and have time and energy left over to process that feeling so that you can separate yourself from that sense of failure.
So switching between those modes can be hard. But then your kid asks you to teach them how to draw a mermaid and you realize, “Well, I’ve never actually drawn a mermaid. Huh.” So then you and your kid draw a mermaid together, and I can’t think of anything that feels more balanced than that does for that moment.
6. Describe your favorite creative work by another Charlottesville artist?
Any song performed by Devon Sproule. The dead spot of grass in the shape of the base of the Robert E. Lee monument in Emancipation Park is pretty great.
7. How do your other interests influence your art?
Maybe that’s obvious by now?
Artist, writer and teacher Matt Shelton (he/him) received a BFA from Guilford College in 2004 and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from VCU in 2012. He has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo presentations and in recurrent collaboration with Trinidadian artist Nikolai Noel. His art criticism has appeared in Burnaway, MONDAY Art Journal, Southern Cultures, Art Papers, Ext.1708, LOOKsee, and the Richmond Arts Review. He is the recipient of a VMFA Fellowship and was a member of the inaugural cohort of the Richmond Critical Art Writers workshop. Over the past decade, he has taught across 2D, conceptual, digital, and time-based mediums to undergraduates in Virginia. He lives with his family in Earlysville, Virginia, and teaches art to middle school students in Charlottesville.
The opinions expressed in this interview are solely those of the artist and do not necessarily represent the policies or positions of NCAI.
This summer's series is presented by The Seven Society and features artists affiliated with the University of Virginia.
