Photo credit: Conor Lawless

Set in the Novellus Castellum gallery space Exertus, Matt Fleming fills the space with old cameras, projectors, monitors, he creates a sort-of-ghost-like landscape of stuff. The sputtering, whirring almost attic like detritus might remind you of the unravelled psyche of some obsessive and unworldly geek but its much more than this. Memories of childhood peep out against the broken, static hiss of a deranged television studio camera, while a slide-projector ‘ca-chunks’ violently somewhere in a dimly lit corner.

On an entrance wall are records of Matt Fleming’s ideas on the installation. It alludes to notions of Irony and melancholy. Melancholia can often be read as a metaphor for the mind's collapse. This is where Fleming toy’s with us as his experiments, his machines collapse and spit their parts out at us. His machines are challenging us, mocking us and prodding us to find a meaning in something that is, associated with the twee, the post-adolescent and the nerdy. Its Tinguelyesque art brut mixed with a subtle pinch of Takahashi spice topped with Gondrylike garnish for the digital age all finished off with a rye smile. You could mistake this for real chaos, and the yet the post-modern ethos of chaos is seen as no longer original. Fleming’s success is that the layout of the space functions very much like a Dutch still life. Hence the originality lies within deciphering the externally and internally complex language and the organised chaos of this machine-like landscape laden rich in its jokes, puns and wise cracks all cleverly hidden and sub-verted for our pleasure.

Richard A. Phipps

Mat Fleming presented a series of experiments in 35mm film, 16mm film and video, which developed through his residency at the Exsertus project space. A cacophony of machines and films, amongst other things, attempt to deconstruct the process of translating 35mm photography into film; reverse engineer the pixel; and reveal the sculptural mechanics of the process.

Ele Carpenter

“The aim of the show is to create something of beauty. I think beauty is truth, keeping in mind 3 things: that one shouldn't take oneself too seriously, that truth is stranger than fiction and that something should be true to its own trickery. Like Godard said: cinema is "reality 24 times a second".

My show of work produced experimentally over the last month hopefully embraces that contradiction and my own limitations working like an artisan in an industrial medium.
I am hopefully turning failed science into good art and presenting new entertaining film installations in progress.”

Mat Fleming
[Collaboration on 35mm film with Chris Bate]