Matthew Mazzota
USA
Installation, Architecture
Selected Exhibitions/ Projects (Photos)
Open House, 2013
The Park Spark Project, 2010
Busycle, 2006-Current
Matthew Mazzotta is an artist, alumna of the Art, Culture, and Technology program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, inventor and lecturer at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.
Mazzotta’s work evolves from an interest in exploring the relationship between people and their environments, as well as between each other. His practice is conceptual and manifests as participatory public interventions that aim at bringing criticality and a sense of openness to the places we live. These socially-engaged interventions allow for a re-entry of the physical and metaphorical landscapes of our lives by provoking conversations around exploring the local, questions of ecology, public involvement, community building, artist sensibilities, science, and dissecting the systems that make up our ‘everyday’. His work is about reversing the top down one-way exchange of ideas and allowing people to contribute in a more tangible way to their own environment. Often times these projects include working with community members, laborers, academics, engineers, builders, city governments, activists, artists, poets, and anyone else that is willing to be involved in something experiential and participatory.
Mazotta’s public art project Open House was the result of a collaboration between the Coleman Center for the Arts, and the people of York Alabama to transform a blighted property in York’s downtown that morphs into a 100 seat open air theater, free for the public. It was the winner of the 2013 A+Award for Architecture+Urban Transformation.