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190 Plays4 years ago
Matt Hall grew up on a small farm in rural southern Oregon where he spent his time drawing dinosaurs and shoveling snow. He moved to Portland in 1997 to attend The Pacific Northwest College of Art as a painting major. His current work is an assemblage of rebuilt found objects and processed natural history ephemera. Exploring themes of loss, memory, mending, re-use and magical thinking. His work has been shown in numerous west coast galleries and and as far away as Germany.
He can currently be found living in North Portland, repairing old taxidermy, going on walks with his two children, and waving at neighborhood cats.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57820979-whispers-for-terra
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Transcript
Introduction of Host and Producer
00:00:02
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host, Ken Zalante. Editor and producer, Peter Bauer. Oh, that's amazing. I know. The technology is just... We're living in the future, Ken. We're living in the future. We're living in the future right now.
00:00:28
Speaker
It's happening right now. Okay, great. Let's do this, man.
Introduction to Artist Matt Hall
00:00:35
Speaker
This is Ken Volante with something rather than nothing, and I'm pleased to have Matt Hall as a guest. Matt Hall is an artist in Portland. I was drawn in by his images, his installations, which use bones.
00:00:55
Speaker
and in other material in order to create his unique installations. Matt Hall, welcome to something rather than nothing.
Is Art Innate or a Process?
00:01:04
Speaker
Thanks for having me, Ken.
00:01:06
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And obviously we'll get more into your art in about what you're doing with it and what it is for the listeners. But prior to getting into that, I know from your bio and you grew up in Southern Oregon, but the main question related to when you were younger is when you were born, when you were younger, you were already an artist?
00:01:37
Speaker
I don't really think so. I think if an artist is someone who is a participant in making art, then I don't think anyone can be born an artist. I think to be an artist is to participate in an activity. So you have to make art to be an artist. I think I was definitely born with a need for maybe
00:02:06
Speaker
in interior space. I have a lot of siblings. I grew up in a really small house. There wasn't any privacy. And I think I crave that kind of aloneness that can come with making things. You know, I crave that ability to be private in a way.
00:02:26
Speaker
to sort of carve out that space. And that interior space is something that I always wanted and always needed. So I think I was born with that propensity, but not necessarily. I don't think, I don't really think anyone is born an artist per se. I think being an artist is about doing the work. It's about putting the work and making art. That's, you know, it's a lot of work to be an artist. It's a lot of effort. It's a lot of activity that is not always fun. And it's a lot of grinding out the days that
00:02:56
Speaker
It's hard when you don't have inspiration or you don't have ideas or you don't have materials or whatever. And that to me defines an artist more than just saying you're an artist. I think you really have to do the action of making art. Yeah. I wanted to jump in on that too. And you're saying about the, the, the, the labor and the process. So one of the things I noticed in how you talked about what I've read, um, you know, with an interview with you is that, uh,
Overcoming Doubt in Art Creation
00:03:24
Speaker
There's there's there's a lot of labor and there's a lot of days and I noticed the word nothing Whereas like nothing seems to to to be happening and in that space there Matt when you're when you're creating your art and It feels laborious and it feels like this thing isn't What's occurring with this? They've been doing that um, how do you maintain your your your your practice in your vision of knowing where you're going for if we have that period where it's like
00:03:53
Speaker
This thing isn't changing. It isn't doing what I want. What happens for you during that process? I think a lot of doubt. I think a lot of fear that it's going to fail, but also a lot of commitment to allowing it to happen. I think, you know, I tried to sort of interject a certain amount of process oriented failure that can happen.
00:04:21
Speaker
in the work so that throughout that waiting time and throughout that building up period there can be a lot of change. I don't I set an idea I say this is what I want to make and then I'm willing to change it as I go through to allow for new ideas to come in. So throughout the process you know there is a lot of boredom there is a lot of time when the work is just extremely tedious but
00:04:48
Speaker
Also, that tedium is sort of a space of meditation, a space of calm because you're just doing these repetitive process over and over and over again. And in that, you can kind of consider the entire framework of what you're working on and the entire concept of what you're working on and maybe new ideas or a new process come through that. And I leave room for that discovery.
00:05:15
Speaker
you know to and that's a lot of excitement there is that there is discovery in that sort of boredom um space yeah so and let's get in specifically for the listener yeah and it's always it's always a little bit difficult to sometimes i jump in and try to like hey let me describe Matt's art and something but but one one entry point i wanted to to mention in the show recently i've had um
00:05:42
Speaker
Um, there's the, some guests in, in talking about, um, uh, uh, death. I mean, we had spirits and ghosts and kind of these, uh, signals of life kind of like, uh, that
Art Beyond Death: Exploring Loss and Rejuvenation
00:05:56
Speaker
around us. And when I've talked to these guests, we kind of drove right into, you know, affirmation of life of recognition or reflection of death. And your works have a skeleton, uh, in, in,
00:06:11
Speaker
And as an installation of bones, you know, death is in front of you, or at least the physical, what's left after life has gone. Yeah. And so you're going into that territory where other people, I mean, we all have a little bit of a freak out as we look at this and we get, we get into that. Um,
00:06:33
Speaker
When you're creating your installation, what is your intent? Are you trying to engage the viewer with death, mortality, or you're just kind of leaving these installations to stand on their own in their physicality? You know, I don't think I'm necessarily trying to talk about death, per se.
00:07:02
Speaker
I think I am often talking about loss, and I am often talking about sort of repair and rejuvenation. But the macabre or the morbid side of it that you might immediately get from just seeing the pieces, from seeing a skeleton, let's say, isn't really
00:07:29
Speaker
on the forefront of my mind. The use of the animals is really about that the narrative makes sense to me as far as how I relate to the world. Like when I was growing up, for instance,
00:07:52
Speaker
I was never exposed to art, fine art. I never went to art museums. I never saw beautiful paintings or whatever. And so, whereas someone who, let's say you grew up in New York and you go to The Met and you can see Rothko, let's say, you might see that in person, you might say,
00:08:20
Speaker
you might look at that and say, this painting is sort of a map forward for me. This just sort of shows me how I can explain my life, right? And then you might sort of decide, well, I'm going to paint these big paintings, and that's the way I'm going to tell my story. And for me, I never had that specific fine art visual to get.
00:08:48
Speaker
Growing up on a farm, we saw things die all the time. We saw, you know, we saw like a pig get butchered or we would, you know, maybe a sheep would die in the field or something. And that sort of visceral quality, that physicality of the body was very much part of my life. And in a way that becomes sort of my, like I can look at that and say, oh, that's a map.
00:09:11
Speaker
to explain my life. That's a way to go forward. So the using of the animals isn't really talking about death. It's just that the narrative makes sense. The dead animals or the corpses or the rebuilding of it makes sense within the way that I see my story and how to explain what I'm trying to say. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for that. I know you've
00:09:38
Speaker
One of the galleries I really enjoy in Portland is Antler Gallery. And I know you had an exhibition there. I'm just giving a shout out to Antler because I see a lot of the artists, including yourself, who come through doing some amazing work. And it feels like a unique place in Portland to find it. Matt, we're talking about your art, but I always throw a little curve ball or two to move back to the conceptual world and make sure we got our
00:10:08
Speaker
or what we're talking about down. Matt Hall, what is art?
Art as a Lens on Human Experience
00:10:17
Speaker
I think, you know, in my mind art is sort of this acknowledgement that our experiences as humans, the experience of being a human is so vast and so nuanced and so complicated that we kind of
00:10:37
Speaker
need other ways to explain it in a sense to talk about it. And the way to do it is sort of to sort of show the edges of it in a way. Like we're sort of mapping out the peripheries of what we're seeing so that we can get a better sense of what it's like to be human.
00:10:59
Speaker
And I always think about it in that periphery sense, where if you see something out of the periphery of your vision, let's say, but you look straight at it, you lose what it was. There's a shadow there. And so much of life is like that, where we can't look directly at it. We have to talk about it in these
00:11:22
Speaker
side-stepped ways so that we can understand it from the outside. And I think art is sort of an effort to do that, an effort to sort of build, you know, the contours of this greater experience that we're having that we don't know how to explain it. So we, you know, maybe we write songs about things or we write a book about things or we paint a picture about things, these feelings and these
00:11:48
Speaker
these sensations that we don't know how to speak it. We don't know how to say it to other people. So we have to make these, you know, methods that we can explain at all. So I think art is that. I'm sorry to jump in there, Matt, but I heard that because a big theme.
00:12:06
Speaker
that comes up as like the ineffable, that which can't be said, you know? And I think, honestly, I mean, one of the reasons I love the question, what is art so much? Because it seems to be a question on some of the experience of when, when you see Gernica by Picasso, if you see it in person, in the scope of it, and the mortality and war in Guerra and death, you know, you lose your breath,
00:12:35
Speaker
There's something in the experience of art sometimes that seems to be the ineffable that we can't say. And the question about what is art is like, I like what you're saying. We're trying to get at it. You were trying to ease into it and saying, these are the contours of it. And like what you're saying, like with Guernica, like when Picasso paints this, he's saying something so much bigger than this painting. It's this huge,
00:13:04
Speaker
painting about this amazing part of history, but it's also about human beings and it's also about
00:13:11
Speaker
you know, the story that he felt in his life. And he's telling a bigger story than even, he's telling a story to the future, he's telling a story to the past, he's telling the story in his present. And that's kind of, you know, the magic of art is that it doesn't, it can move in that space. It doesn't have to be right where it stands at any given moment. You know, Guernica is just as powerful today as it was when he painted it.
00:13:39
Speaker
Right, you know it sure is and it's like one of those great questions of our how do you do that? Right? Yeah 200 years. It might be the same thing. Right? So exactly 200 years is a very optimistic number right now, but We'll leave aside that yeah Just just just for the moment. Um, yeah, I have looked at your
00:14:05
Speaker
drawings that I've seen and I've also looked at those in conjunction with your installations and I just want to tell you just to kind of introduce it. I love looking at them and I don't know for your as the artist whether you have any intent to kind of pull them in in conjunction but the
00:14:26
Speaker
juxtaposition of like those drawings, I could see what I would call like the unformed or the looser, and it's such a different way of looking, I think, at what you were doing versus the installation itself. Can you just talk? I don't want that to be missed because I hadn't seen them, and then I got really into your drawings. What's the interplay there? Or do you mean a deliberate interplay with
00:14:54
Speaker
drawing and what you're trying to say or reach. Yeah, it's definitely been something that I've struggled with through the years is that my introduction in art was definitely through drawing through, you know, pencil to paper sort of work. And so my feeling about that drawing has always been a big part of how I think about art, how I think about making. And
00:15:22
Speaker
It's it's always been something I've wanted to integrate more into my work. I struggle with it, though, because it definitely requires a different mode of thinking for me because my work is is the sculptural work is very slow because it requires a significant amount of preparation and also engineering and
00:15:42
Speaker
various, you know, various things that I have to do. And then the drawing is much more spontaneous in a lot of ways, right? You just you can literally do it in that space immediately. They do interact in the fact that I'm trying to say similar things. I'm trying to talk about similar things. I don't know how well I've
00:16:05
Speaker
being able to explain that in my work. I think that's always an effort for artists is like, especially when you're trying to work in two different mediums, you're trying to say that similar stories in a different way. And I think I've struggled with that. I haven't always been successful in that. But
00:16:31
Speaker
You know, through the years, I've definitely worked to try to close that gap. Maybe I could do more, I don't know. But the drawing is, it has more of a, when I draw, I try to create an effort where I don't, I use a pen so I can't erase. That's really important to me because I want the action to be one action. I don't want there to be any opportunity to go backwards.
00:17:01
Speaker
Because I think within that, you'll find, it's like a, I have this thing about the trap door, a creative trap door, where you set up these spaces where you deliberately have mistakes sort of pre-planned in your way, and that will force you to work around them, and it makes you much more creative, I think. And in that drawing, I've set the trap door of not allowing myself to erase anything. So whenever there's a mistake, which there always is, because you always mess it up,
00:17:31
Speaker
I have to figure out a way to fix that and I think that gives vibrancy and life to the work, the drawing work. It's harder to do that in sculpture because sculpture is obviously in a three-dimensional space and it's defined by gravity and it has to have a certain amount of
00:17:52
Speaker
you know, it has to be museum quality in a sense that it has to hold up to light and temperature and, you know, all these other things. So I can't be so, so open and willy-nilly about it. I wish I could. And I try to, I'm slowly getting better at interjecting that kind of things into the sculpture. So. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to mention one thing in senior art kind of evoked back to me when I was, I had traveled once in the past to
00:18:22
Speaker
the Czech Republic and there's a bone ossuary church in Sedlec, which is a Roman Catholic church. And so I walked into and I was like, and there's bone chandeliers and then amongst the walls and everything. And my, it was so fascinating to me because when I stepped in, my fundamental question was I'm a New England, Roman Catholic, I grew up New England, Roman Catholic. And I'm there. I'm like, uh,
00:18:51
Speaker
how is the bone church, a Roman Catholic church, you know? And it was just so fascinating to me because it represented maybe a completely different connection, you know, theologically, spiritually and everywhere. Where you're actually worshiping was like, mortality, mortality, mortality, bones. Yeah, yeah. But yet,
00:19:13
Speaker
the whatever within, you know, not getting into the religious part of it, but how that impacted the themes of anybody reflecting there. I have, I have no idea. So it was, you know, it must have been huge. I mean, if you think about going to like these osseraries where you do see the bones of your ancestors or
00:19:38
Speaker
you know, literally your own family members or whatever, you're going to be reflecting on your mortality all the time, right? And you're going to be reflecting on the future that you have in heaven, let's say, you know, or, or whatever your second life, you're going to be reflecting on that because of the obvious objects in front of you. It's very,
00:19:58
Speaker
very tangible. I think it must be huge, you know? Yeah, that was probably it. It was like it. Boom. And I'm like, yeah, what am I supposed to do with it? Yeah. You know, where's the frankincense in the robes? Yeah, it's definitely a little less. Definitely a little bit less clean, clean sort of feeling of it, right? Yeah.
00:20:23
Speaker
One of the things, and part of this is for me, is a separate question. I'm really interested in talking about the drawing, and I know you've done painting, and I even saw a comment that you made about
00:20:38
Speaker
kind of like reflected on the relationship that you have, you know, with painting and how you, you know, try to move that. One of the things I found as I've developed personally as an artist, you know, here and there moving into different forms, one of the things that has astounded me is that I have completely different relationships with what I create in each form.
00:21:03
Speaker
Sure. And I found that, like, for me, prior to moving into that, I had it in my head that I'm an artist. I'm going to feel like an artist here and I'm going to feel like an artist here. But I have a very fun relationship with film. I have a very tortured relationship with painting. And I just found that whatever it is that I'm trying to do,
00:21:25
Speaker
none of it was the same. Do you find your relationships with the ways that you know, I know you mentioned drawing and with the installation, but do you find a distinct relationship with the forms that you create? I think for me, the work that's made is just a byproduct of the making. So
00:21:50
Speaker
In a way, they're all kind of the same. I mean, I struggle in different ways for each thing. Obviously, they present different challenges. But if the really the making of the art, the discovery that happens during it is really what I'm looking for. The end product just happens to exist.
00:22:14
Speaker
And that's a good thing for me, obviously. I mean, you can make stuff and it'd be a total disaster, and maybe you're not as satisfied. But when I work towards something, like if I have an idea and I say, oh, this idea is a drawing idea, and then I
00:22:30
Speaker
work towards it and maybe I struggle, but I find little answers throughout that and then I get to this end product that I'm like, oh, this is a tangible, nice thing that I am satisfied with. That gives me the exact same feeling as when I think, I'm going to make this sculpture and I have this idea and I'm going to do the exact same process to get to there. At the end, that feeling of discovery and that feeling, that release of being able to say,
00:23:01
Speaker
a little more clearly what I'm trying to say in the world is exactly the same. So the medium doesn't really matter. It's the experience that I'm looking for. And the end result just happens to be different. Yeah. I asked you, Matt, about what art is.
Art as a Tool for Self-Reflection
00:23:26
Speaker
And one of the bigger questions
00:23:29
Speaker
I think artists deal with, but I think even right now, pandemic, social upheaval, last two or three years, all this stuff. What's the role of art? Is art still supposed to do the same thing for us humans? What's the role of art?
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah. I thought about this a lot. What is the role of art? And I don't necessarily know from a social standpoint what the role of art is. I think from a personal standpoint, the role of art
00:24:10
Speaker
acts as a way to see and understand myself more. So the act of doing it gets me closer to myself and maybe gets me closer to that part of myself that I either don't want to see or can't see or can't understand. Helps me understand my own life more. Helps me understand the people around me more.
00:24:38
Speaker
helps me understand how I act with the people around me, how I connect to those people. It becomes sort of a mycosm of the world in a way. Like if I start from nothing and I build an object through all of this ephemera or whatever, things that I find, and then I get to an end point, it has its own little lifetime.
00:25:09
Speaker
And in that little lifetime, it's sort of like living a life completely. It's like I can live a whole life right there and see where I went wrong, see the struggles, see the fears of failure, see the triumphs, see where at the end it wasn't exactly as I imagined it, but maybe it's better, maybe it's worse. Doing that over and over again, it's really, it's helped me immensely and just,
00:25:37
Speaker
my everyday life, you know, getting through the world. I know I can imagine this life as being just a giant end product of art. You know, when I'm 90 or whatever, it's like, that's the same thing as the end of a sculpture. And so in that sense, it's just for me, the role of art is just to help me understand and teach myself how to be a better human being, how to be more
00:26:03
Speaker
aware how to be more in touch with people around me and myself and sort of understand my experience better. Yeah, I really appreciate that. You know, I've been as a philosopher and as somebody who's tried to develop my practice, I really connect with what you're saying as far as, you know, there's a certain amount of like,
00:26:23
Speaker
navigating life either through the art or if you feel like completely completely shitty and then you look at something beautiful and then like half an hour you're like still smiling about it like hmm that can't be bad like yeah you know totally totally and i think i think that's that's also like what is you know this this uh thing about art being having more or less value than anything else in the world i think is totally
00:26:54
Speaker
wrong in a lot of senses because everything has similar value. Art is an important thing and I think it's often undervalued, but is it more valuable than a teacher or is it more valuable than a nurse? It's not. It's similar, but it's not more or less valuable. It's just a different thing and they have different roles
00:27:23
Speaker
I don't know. I think we often put art on this grandiose scale, but it's really just about getting closer to our experiences as humans than anything else. Yeah. I think that grandiose scale is something that comes up a lot. It does cause confusion around
00:27:42
Speaker
the questions, right? Because, you know, when we mentioned, like, your answer for what is art, right? Somebody answered, what is art? Art is what's in the museum. Somebody could say that. Sure. And I think a lot of people believe that. Right. And then there's this deference that and it's fine, you know, if it's in the museum, it's been anointed or whatever. And there's whole sorts of like, issues, you know, issues around that. But I think when we what you're saying is like,
00:28:08
Speaker
It's more like part of life and it doesn't have to be granted. I think when I ask these questions sometimes there's so much confusion because people like, well, I don't know about museums. I don't know about
00:28:25
Speaker
um, I don't know about uh clint and I don't know this stuff and i've never been to the met and I think part of um both with like asking these questions like with philosophy and art is being like Shit, I didn't know what I was doing was art. I didn't know like that that's what I was struggling with and um, I think it can be helpful like
00:28:48
Speaker
to drop it down a tiny bit and be like, you know, absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, that's kind of a little bit what I was trying to say before about the idea of like growing up in a very rural spot that is sort of separated from that culture is is, you know, when when I came to school, when I came to art school, I think I had a lot of I still have a lot of insecurities about art education and art knowledge.
00:29:16
Speaker
and how I came and I was like, what do I have to say? I don't know anything about art. All my knowledge is farm knowledge. I saw cows get born or that sort of thing.
00:29:31
Speaker
I think that's kind of what we're talking about is this idea that art could be anything. Art could be the smallest experience in the world, and it could be the biggest experience in the world. The atomic bomb could be art, but also a mouse dying could be art. There's these huge ranges, and the value is the same anyway. And I think
00:30:00
Speaker
That takes a long time as artists to think about and to really consider because you want to be as honest as possible with your own experience. I think to be good at art and to make good art is about really trying to be honest
00:30:16
Speaker
about your own experience and talking about exactly how you feel in the world and honest assessment of how you feel. I think when you start putting it into the context of the bigger art story, it can be overwhelming. And you often might say things that are not true to your experience. Yeah. Yeah.
00:30:37
Speaker
when you had mentioned the horror of the atomic bomb as art. I thought of, I'm a huge Twin Peaks fan, Twin Peaks season three, episode eight. You might be able to see the depiction of the atomic bomb as art is. I have to slip in my footnote for my Twin Peaks friends amongst it. And this is a particular sports stadium. Yeah, of course, of course. Couple more big questions, Matt.
00:31:09
Speaker
What or who made you who you are?
Influence of Upbringing on Artistic Development
00:31:17
Speaker
Certainly my childhood, I think, informed me a lot. I have a lot of siblings, like I said before. I grew up in a really rural area. We were fairly poor and isolated, and I think that affected me a lot, not always in good ways, but I think it definitely
00:31:39
Speaker
made me the way that I am and made me capable of doing some of the things that I do because I'm used to being alone. I'm used to being, um, I like being alone. I like long days in the studio by myself ruminating on things, um, partially because I spent a lot of time just wandering around by myself as a kid, ruminating on things, you know, trying to escape my household and, um,
00:32:09
Speaker
So it kind of prepared me for doing what I do now. So I would say, yeah, I would say growing up where my family life, my childhood, where I grew up, all those things definitely made me who I am. And also, I think that there is often this notion that artists is like this
00:32:34
Speaker
island upon themselves that they make amazing you know here's this genius and they make amazing things and they do all these things by themselves but really it's like art is created in a community there's no vacuum here you know part of what makes me able to do what i do is my partner madeline and like my friends around me who help me source materials or teach me their skills or
00:33:01
Speaker
you know give me cheap studio spaces or whatever like you know there's the gallery owners that help you have shows and there's um you know owners of businesses that encourage you to do things like this that's really important i think that the thing that makes me who i am now is this community that we live in um it is it isn't
00:33:23
Speaker
I'm not just an island, is what I'm trying to say. I would love to take all the credit for what I do, but that would be unfair. There's too many people who help me out to take all that credit. It really is about the people around me, the family around me. Yeah. Thanks, Matt. No, I love that. I love that. Okay. Here's the big fastball coming
Storytelling: A Central Human Experience
00:33:47
Speaker
at you. Why is there something rather than nothing? Yeah.
00:33:57
Speaker
you know, we're either telling a story in life or we're hearing a story in life. And it's like the thing that's in the center of it all is the story. The story always exists. So regardless, there's always something. It's just a matter of are we going to
00:34:22
Speaker
discuss the narrative ourselves. Are we going to interject into the narrative by telling the story that we want to tell, or are we going to be reading the story that's told to us? The story always exists. There's always something. I think it's just a matter of how we're part of the narrative. Are we the tellers or are we the viewers, right? And that fluctuates at all times, I think. In different spaces, we're different.
00:34:52
Speaker
people, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's, you know, there's something, there's always something, I think it's just a matter of where we are in that, and how we want to interact with it. Yeah, I found in talking to artists about this, that word story, yeah, comes up a lot in this question, I would never predicted it, like, in my head, concept, yeah, more, but a lot of times,
00:35:21
Speaker
Um, it has to do with the story or what we're saying, or we're telling you and I right now, or what you're trying to communicate with, with it. And, um, I, I, you look, I'm a, I love and have been obsessed with books since I could hold one, you know, stories are, uh, uh,
00:35:44
Speaker
I go there too. I go there. I mean, that's what we're seeking all the time in life with everything. I mean, you think about everything we do as people, we're seeking stories. And I think our desire to understand the world in that way is so intense. It's so powerful. It's our whole motivation. We're always seeking stories.
00:36:06
Speaker
and telling stories and wanting to tell our own story and you know making art is really about is about trying to tell your own story explaining it because everyone's experience is so different and so we all have to figure out ways to like be better at telling our stories and so it's like this constant struggle to say how can I do it better how can I do it more clearly how can I make it more honest how can I tell my story more
00:36:32
Speaker
in a more concise way so that I can be understood a little more and I can understand others more. Yeah, yeah. I agree. I think a story is the key element of everything. It's every part of our lives are a story. Yeah, I love that. I love that as well. Connected with that. Hey,
Where to Find Matt Hall's Work
00:36:53
Speaker
Matt, I enjoy your art. I enjoy this discussion. I enjoy the drawings, the installations, the things that you do, but I want the listeners to come in contact with them as well. Where do folks go to find you? I am on Instagram. It's at Matt Hall Art PDX.
00:37:21
Speaker
I have my website, which is mattallrpdx.com.
00:37:25
Speaker
Some of my work can be seen at Paxingate here in Portland. I occasionally have things there. I've done a lot of work for them. Occasionally I have shows in galleries around town. I'm a little bit on a stasis period now because of the kids, which is great, but it definitely takes up a lot of art time. Yeah. But I'm working back into it, slowly but surely.
00:37:53
Speaker
So when I'm hoping I have some things planned in the in the future, so I'm hoping I can carve out little spaces here and there to get to get more done. But yeah, yeah, they could definitely check my Instagram out. That's probably the best place to see what I'm working on any given day. Yeah. And, you know, I'm part of it with the show, and I'm sure you've seen Matt is that, you know, one of the things I've been proud of is to to have a community around, you know, around artists and around
00:38:21
Speaker
around questions, around philosophy, around questioning. And what I'm saying is, as you go along, something rather than nothing, listeners will definitely be hearing about the stuff that you and others have done.
00:38:42
Speaker
I just wanted to tell you Matt, I've been really looking forward to this conversation. I think it's been on its way for a little while in the background, but we got there and so I've been really excited to chat with you and I've really enjoyed
00:38:57
Speaker
the time, I really look forward to the things that you create and wish you the best with your family. And if the art production goes down because you're tending to the needs of the most vulnerable mammal in the animal kingdom, the young human child, it is okay if we have to wait a little bit longer. Yeah, I tell myself that too. It's sometimes it's hard, but I tell myself that.
00:39:24
Speaker
It's all right. Kids have to eat lunch. If we were mammals that produce children that just wandered off and hunted their own things, we'd be OK. Yeah. Yeah. But alas, we're not. Matt, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you for coming out to something. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Ken. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah. I look forward to the wonderful things you create and hope to hear more from you soon, brother. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Take care now.
00:39:54
Speaker
Okay bye. This is something rather than nothing.