Matthew Geller

BIO

In the 1980s, Matthew Geller shifted his studio practice from primarily sculpture to the production of video works, reworking the structure and style of television storytelling through comic narratives that played with conventional genres such as documentary, fairy tale, and melodrama. Employing fragmentation and disjunction as narrative strategies, Geller intercut several seemingly unrelated anecdotal stories into cohesive, if nonlinear, works. Beginning with his fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, he integrated his skills as a storyteller and sculptor by creating intimately observed worlds in miniature. Over the past 20+ years, he has taken these ideas, changed the scale, and expanded the possibilities for site and a chaotic viewership by producing temporary and permanent public art —often functioning as follies in the landscape—which have been described as “industrial baroque settees.”

STATEMENT

Matthew Geller’s site-responsive, interactive, and participatory sculptures transform spaces into destinations. The work activates its surroundings and promotes visitor interaction, often carving out intimate moments within distinctly public settings.

Geller’s public artworks foreground embodied experience as a primary mode of engagement, positioning the viewer not as a spectator but as a co-producer of meaning. Closely attuned to a site’s functional, social, and visual conditions, the sculptures operate at the intersection of infrastructure and encounter, generating moments of pause, orientation, and reflection within active civic environments. Drawing from an industrial aesthetic—where form is inseparable from function and efficiency—the work references amusement park rides for their capacity to produce heightened sensory awareness, and town squares for their historical role as spatial frameworks for collective life.

The performative dimension of the work emerges through use. Geller’s sculptures function as open-ended spatial propositions that structure, but do not prescribe, behavior. Acts such as waiting, meeting, resting, and observing unfold as forms of informal civic performance, through which the work is continuously redefined by its participants.

By incorporating familiar materials and environmental cues, the sculptures establish immediate legibility while sustaining moments of estrangement and wonder. Responsive elements—shaped by human presence and shifting weather conditions—introduce temporal variability, ensuring that the work remains contingent and relational rather than fixed.

Ultimately, Geller’s public artworks operate as critical yet hospitable interventions within the built or natural landscape. They generate micro–public spaces that support collective presence and shared experience, contributing to a nuanced understanding of place as something produced through use, encounter, and embodied participation.

BOOKS & VIDEOS

BOOKS
From Receiver to Remote Control: The TV Set [Amazon]
Difficulty Swallowing: A Medical Chronicle [Printed Matter]
1983 Engagements {Printed Matter]
1981 Engagements {Printed Matter]
Hidden in a Musty Chamber {Printed Matter]

VIDEO
Distributed by Electronics Arts Intermix
Windfalls
Everglades City
Bees & Thoroughbreds
Split Britches
In Case of Nuclear Attack
Postage Paid