Matthew LaPaglia

words & images, sometimes both

In illustration on track-feed paper depicting a large sculpture with hearts dangling inside a wire cage, around which several small red figures stand and look. Text reads: A Film by Matthew LaPaglia, From a Spaceless Within

From a Spaceless Within

2021

How does closeness look?

A filmmaker confronting the efficacy of telling one story over another rewrites expectations for a failed project about the artist known as Miles, whose planned installation addresses the experiments conducted by psychologist Harry Harlow in the late 1950s. Compositing past and future, truth and fiction, From a Spaceless Within approaches the construction and dematerialization of the artist while asking where our intentions take root when we attempt to create anything at all.

Runtime: 19:58

A figure stands slightly obscured behind a large, T-shaped sculpture-like concrete object surrounded by half-dead grass.

An image of psychologist Harry Harlow in his lab in Madison, WI, looking down on a young rhesus monkey as it clings to a cloth-covered surrogate mother object. — Harry Harlow with a monkey and surrogate mother

A concept illustration depicting several small red figures inspecting a furry tent-like sculpture that rises out of frame. — Concept Illustration for Miles’s unfinished work by Jillian Hagadorn

A young rhesus monkey bites at the bars of a cage containing another young rhesus monkey in front of a cloth-covered surrogate mother object in a laboratory simulation room.

A phone screen displays the camera zoomed on the transparent shoulder of a window mannequin.

Telephlâneur

2019

Here to there and everywhere else.

Telephlâneur blends video and performance to capture the psyche of a walker through in-phone activity that filters both the external world and the internal world into a digital symptom of the two, combined.

Runtime: 09:03

Desert Eden: A Film By Matthew LaPaglia

2019

You’re going to have to imagine it.

Runtime: 08:13

A dog carrying a ball is in focus between two dogs in motion, their bodies split into RGB colors.

CANICULAR

2019

Dog days / Dog daze

In Canicular, different pasts are considered, and the specious present is made apparent. This piece is pulled forward by time and, at first, backward by text, asking that we start from a different beginning to explore alternate pasts and undeveloped selves. The focal points are canine—the bodies, the behaviors, slowed into purposeful observation of how me might be still even as we remain in motion.

Runtime: 10:55

A person in bright red sits alone on a stage holding a glass of water with a small toy duck inside.

Grow

2019

This live performance disrupts expectations of immediacy through the body of a parched actor tasked with waiting for a toy duck to grow in water as part of a live demo. By roping in the audience as he himself has been roped into sitting with the duck by automated voices of authority, the growing frustration transfers to those doing the watching, and in turn, the waiting.

Performed in collaboration with the exhibition, “Reflect, Resist, Replay,” in Boston, April 2019.

A pixelated, glitched image of a person golding paper; above them, a rat surfacing in water.

The Hope Experiment

2019

In the 1950s, scientist Curt Richter measured how long submerged rats would swim before surrendering to their circumstances. Hope, he found, kept them afloat.

Runtime: 02:58

An exercise instructor with a fading smile stands in front of a cheery green screen background.

Get Moving!

2018

Start your day off right by joining Chet Tibbitts for some low impact aerobics that will keep you on track for success.

Remember, it’s all about attitude!

Runtime: 05:45

The Life Inside Her

2017

A three-part video piece combining archival footage and writing, text manipulation, and dance that muses on navigating self-determination while invariably bound to real and imagined pasts, the fleeting present, and the uncertain future.

Runtime: 14:00

Two Star Trek characters in red shirts are struck by blasts while Captain Kirk and Spok, in black and white, look on.

Psy-Fi

2015

The 1960s Milgram experiment and Star Trek: The Original Series commingle to demonstrate how we value each other and may begin to think about power, empathy, truth, and fabrication.

Runtime: 04:26