ARTIST STATEMENT

I am fascinated by the practice of kerning type. Kerning is the process of adjusting the space between individual letters in a piece of text. Competent kerning hinges the individual letters into a cohesive and legible word. It is a process of locating and shifting/destabilizing the word’s individual letters and in effect dissolving and reconstituting its coherence as a symbol. The word meaning becomes its components-- m e a n i n g --and for the life of me I can no longer see it as meaning.

My recent projects explore two cultural artifacts as sites that enforce meaning/s and power; architecture and media representation. In architecture, the term ‘program’ refers to the intended use of the built spaces. It includes how people will migrate, congregate and inhabit the spaces. The resulting built environment aims to shape and control the use, and experience of spaces and time. Similarly the proliferation of media and remediated images and sounds are also a training ground for their reception. Through distribution systems, like television, film, web pages, blogs, podcasts, et. al, narratives are repeated and reformed until their tropes are anticipated when experiencing only a fragmentary image or sound. Like my earlier example of kerning, these forces are largely invisible to the ‘user’.

BIOGRAPHY

Mat Rappaport’s art work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally in galleries, film festivals and public spaces. His current work utilizes mobile video, performance and photography to explore habitation, perception and power as related to built environments. Rappaport is a co-initiator of V1B3 [www.v1b3.com], which seeks to shape the experience of urban environments through media based interventions.

He has received fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Mary L. Nohl Fund, the Montgomery County Ohio Cultural District, and University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies. Rappaport received his MFA from the University of Notre Dame. Rappaport is an Associate Professor at Columbia College in Chicago where he coordinates the Motion Graphics curriculum shared by the Television Department and the Department of Film and Video.