Matt Taber & Scott Nadeau

Elevator Mondays is pleased to present Naked Earth an installation and performance by Matt Taber and Scott Nadeau. Nadeau will perform in the space for the duration of the opening. This exhibition is part of My Name is Everybody an ongoing series of performances and installations that will culminate in a forthcoming video produced by Taber and Nadeau later this year.

Taber and Nadeau imagine a future landscape in which technology is experienced without mediation. Anyone in this landscape can project their desires onto space; the production of objects is reduced to processes of the mind. This landscape is contained within structures of cinematic realism --- the experience of time and space is aestheticized within genre types of the imagination.

The work plays out through the gestures of the protagonist, Everybody, played by Scott Nadeau, who comes to realize that his body is being commodified as he is projects his desires onto space. Coming to the revelation that he is contained by a technological system set within the pastiche American West, Everybody begins a search to understand physical objects and the materiality of his body and experience.

The site-specific installation and performance encapsulates the central narrative as Nadeau performs lifting weights, “a sacred bond between myself and matter”, while staged within a prison cell of his own design. Contained within the Elevator, Nadeau undergoes some of the ritual processes of the physical world while Taber reads from The Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius.

My Name is Everybody is a collaborative series by Matt Taber and Scott Nadeau. Nadeau holds a BFA from School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Taber holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago and an MFA from Columbia University, New York City. Taber and Nadeau have a concurrent exhibition, The Hacienda, also from the My Name is Everybody series currently on view at Holiday Forever Gallery, Jackson, WY. Taber and Nadeau live and work in New York City.