Mathieu Gallois

Published in LIKE Arts Magazine no. seven

These last few months I have been employed at Sydney's newly-opened Fox Studios to work on a Warner Brothers action sci/fi production called The Matrix.
The film is set in the 22nd century when a race of intelligent machines rule the earth, using human beings as their energy source.

Frontier (Polystyrene house)

In 'Every dream home, an artwork'
Spectrum Arts, Sydney Morning Herald

Though I saw his homage to Home Beautiful in its wrecked condition, it moved and challenged me greatly. What became apparent, seeing Frontier in its homely context, was its spiritual aspect.

Polystyrene

A lightweight thermoplastic polymer, polystyrene is unusual for a foam
in that its molecular structure is rigid. Unlike other petroleum-based plastics,
it has a degree of surface tension which resonates when strummed, and it snaps in two in a clean and satisfying way...

Flight 934B

Catalogue essay Flight 953B

Both aircraft and airport as quintessential mainframe processors of societal flows have in recent years become ubiquitous subjects of (and sites for) contemporary art. But rarely does the ‘passenger’ feature as either individuated subject or class of social organisation as here in Matt Gallois’s Flight 934-B. Why so?

Placelessness

Catalogue essay Flight 953B

The transferral of the seating plan aboard a Boeing 747 passenger jet to the flat plane of the gallery wall, in Flight 934-B, is disarmingly literal. Close to four hundred separate photographs – individual portraits of the passengers on a transcontinental flight - make up a composite image, which is an abstraction of the aeroplane.

Flesh, Experimental Art Foundation

Catalogue Publication Experimental Art Foundation

Mathieu Gallois's ambitious installation offered an enigmatic and perceptually compelling experience. The work was a life size 'film set' depicting a desert oasis (with plushly-decorated tent, palm trees and sand). The scene was placed on a large studio set-like platform with a curved back painted in Chroma Key blue.

Flesh, Experimental Art Foundation Publication 2001

Catalogue Publication Experimental Art Foundation

Because blue is the complementary colour of flesh tone (a principle that makes it the favoured background hue in Chroma Key special effects), Gallois's mise en scene floats in a space that seems ambivalent to human life...

Flesh, Experimental Art Foundation

Review (published in LIKE, no. 15 and C-International Contemporary Art Magazine, Canada)

Hollywood has caused us to think of mirages as hallucinations. Their appearance in films signals that an actor, overcome by desert heat, has lost touch with reality, or at least the reality of the film. In actuality, mirages are not formed by the imagination, but are a manipulation of the truth.

Virtually Yours, The Art of Mathieu Gallois

©Anthony Gardner 2002

Catalogue essay

What does it mean to live in a virtual world and a virtual age? Does it mean to exist in a plane reducible to VR, ambient digital television and the like - where everything is information, movements can be algorhythmically encoded and people are merely statistics of use?

HOMEFRONT: The house in new Australian sculpture

COFA website

In 1998, Sydney artist Mathieu Gallois installed a polystyrene facade of a house on an empty lot in a new suburban housing sub-development. Frontier (1998) was a painstakingly exact recreation of a kit-home facade; the proportions of the house were reproduced exactly - down to every roof tile.

NON INDIVIDUALS OF SUPER MODERNITY

Non Individuals of Super Modernity draws heavily upon sociological and anthropological source material. The paper’s emphasis on these non-art disciplines reflects the Marxist underpinnings to my art-making philosophy which perceives the individual as a product and reflection of the changing socio-economic arrangements in which he / she lives.

WAKING THE NEIGHBOURS: The art of Mathieu Gallois

Monument Journal, Issue 60

Though he may call Australia home, artist and aspiring architect, Mathieu Gallois, is an international citizen. The son of an itinerant French banker who worked for a large multinational corporation, he has lived for more than a year at a time in nine cities, spanning six countries and four continents.

CONTAINMENT: Mathieu Gallois

Since 1992 thousands of asylum seekers to Australia have been incarcerated for months, or years, in detention camps across Australia and the Pacific. Amnesty International estimates that as of 29 May 2005, 210 people detained in Australian immigration facilities (including the offshore centre on the South Pacific island of Nauru) had been there for over 18 months.

WRAPPED IN RHETORIC: Musings on 'politics.'

Broadsheet, Volume 35. No 3

It does not seem so long ago that one of Australia’s best young critics, David Teh, appeared to hit the nail on the head when he claimed that '[c]ulture and politics are very carefully kept apart in this country, especially at the public and institutional level’.

Monument to Memory: Woomera in Australian contemporary art.

Art Monthly Australia, Issue 208

‘Welcome to Australia.’ There is a lack of warmth in your voice when you say it; in fact, you don't really mean it. What you mean to say is: ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

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