Artist in Person

Steven Matheson's bright and eccentric media works thrive on misdirection. They either impregnate documentary convention with fiction, or do just the opposite. In either case, the blur of veracity forces us to take account of our expectations, perhaps even imagine reality as a speculative genre. In the ever-quizzical Stanley (1995, 15 mins) an obsessive tool collector relishes the control and symmetry promised by his curious devices, particularly his beloved cross-wrench. Welding interviews, alligator wrestling, and found footage, this portrait describes the efficacy of ritualized gestures in the production of sanity. The Sky and Its Exacting Protocol (1996, 28 mins), made with Jenny Lion, soars through fantasies of flight, using the great blue beyond as a heroic palette. In this "minimalist Western," two pilots muse upon their desire for escape, while the weather clouds their ambitions. Matheson's core work, Apple Grown in Wind Tunnel (2001, 26 mins), is a tale of inoculation set amidst the failures of the future. In a toxic wasteland, a 21st-century shaman broadcasts strange homeopathic remedies to an underground network of ailing folks. Noirish in tone and built upon oddly pristine images of industrial rubble, Apple Grown prophesizes a seditious subculture coaxing cures out of the blight itself: healthcare as anarchic adaptation.