Bio

Matthew LaPaglia (he/they) is a filmmaker, writer, and transdisciplinary artist working in video, installation, and performance art. His work explores art practice as a historiographical tool, interrogating where memory and identity coalesce with(in) collective narratives. His hybrid documentary, From a Spaceless Within, had its world premiere at Hot Docs in 2022, and he is the co-writer of The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry, which was selected for the 2023 Quinzaine des cinéastes (Directors’ Fortnight) at Cannes. Born and raised outside of Syracuse, LaPaglia received a Bachelor of Arts from Colgate University, where he studied history, and earned his MFA from Emerson College in Boston. He currently lives in New England and works in nonfiction film funding.

Artist Statement

My video, film, writing, and performance work seeks to reconcile history and memory within a contemporary lexicon. It asks if the practice of artmaking can itself be a historiographical tool, positioning identity to interrogate the convergence of individual pasts and collective narratives.

What interests me is (re)appropriation, and the potential for materials of the past to be folded back into the present. This is formulated both aesthetically, with collaged visual media and textures, as well as conceptually, invoking sites where history has rooted itself into a greater imaginary, such as mid-century labs from which scientists have attempted to dictate the bounds of experience. As a result, each piece is temporally-minded and deals with material as a time capsule—one that is both exhumed by a piece and created within it. Even as we disinter history, we shape it; a re-telling is still a telling.

I aim to negotiate the way inner lives can be represented outside the confines of our minds, the way histories endure outside of archives. The corporeal plays an imperative role in this process, functioning as a conduit for distilling introspection and retrospection into the form of the human/animal body in space and time, often as it appears mediated through technology or video documentation. Just as critically, the body can be a limiting and overly signified form, and proprioceptive elements may instead be revealed through place, in text, on screens, or by objects.

My work is meant to engage with constructions of identity, longing, and expectation, calling into question the stakes we put in a future that is already being enacted. I intend to explore how we have come to delineate the edges of ourselves, actors in and writers of a present that extends both backward and forward into time we can only embody.

April 2021