THIS WEBSITE IS UNDER SOME CONSTRUCTION

not loads just a little

Artist Statement

Matt Thomas makes his art works mainly in video and animation often, using copyright expired or found sound and video footage licensed under the creative commons agreement.
The notion of collecting has been a key theme throughout the progression of his practice and has remained with him since he was a child. He obsessively collects archive footage as if he is trying to fill a sticker book.
In this new work he has used over four hundred early Hollywood films from a film archive. It’s the utopian ideals of these early films delivery relief from the banality of everyday of life. A couple embrace, kiss passionately, cut to the end, leaving the viewer with a new found sense of optimism and a set of false hopes and dreams. The volume of this formulaic type of film making is ever expanding but was even more prevalent during the world wars and times of depression.
Thomas has been archiving snippets from the ends of films for over a year. The raw sound and video collected from the footage when the clips are layered creates its own symphony. Stating “the end” is a device that is becoming less common in modern film making. In early film making it was standard practice to conclude films in this way. It is no longer essential to punctuate in this way and generally only used by films of a certain pastiche. Many films are often left open ended leaving an endless possibility of sequels. The search for the end is not a new one, man has been seeking it since the beginning.