Matthew Talbot-Kelly, aka A Knobe Dee, is an Irish-Canadian artist, architect and curator. Their wide ranging art practice comprises works in both analog physical (mixed media, collage, assemblage, installations, architecture) and digital time-based (film, animation, interactive, sound, VR and AR, loops) realms.
We are honoured and grateful to predominantly live on, play on and work from the unceded traditional lands and waters of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and shíshálh peoples.
WORKS
About
Self described as “the most influential artist of their generation that nobody knows about”, their practice foregrounds absurdity, collage, non-linearity, and instability as theoretical, organizational and production strategies. A Knobe Dee self identifies as they due to “ancestral fluidity and, frankly, confusion. I carry within me a complex and contradictory cultural and ancestral reality and trajectory. Where my present and real self intersects with both shared past & future fictions are not easily discerned by me.”
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Chief of the Ghost Forest – a mixed media collaboration with Dean Hunt, shishalh Nation, BC, 2023-ongoing. Says Dean, “It’s always a journey trying to escape the ghost world…. The garbage dump is a new variation of the traditional territory of Pk’vs chief of the ghosts. This is an area where this character is felt and can be understood. In this realm that serves as a meeting place between two worlds, Pk’vs emerges as he has always – just beyond the veil where beauty meets darkness. The place that I’m trying to describe is the ‘in between’.”
“Doctor Kali Gehry’s Cabinet of (in)Curiosities & Ecstatic Nonsense”, interactive installation, 2020-present is an ongoing architectural/performative/mixed media and digital work. This modern revisioning Cabinet of (in)Curiosities is financed by the Canada Council. Version 1.0 was revealed as a performative workshop and exhibition in a small Public Art Gallery, and version 2.0, was revealed as a performative workshop and exhibition in a Main Street storefront. Version 3.0 was in a private home, Version 4.0 was in a Vancouver black box theatre as the mise-en-scene for an absurdist opera. Version 5.0 was outdoors, on river rocks below Whistler’s Audain gallery, Version 5.1 was beside half collapsed bridge over a river in Merritt, Version 6.0 was in an historic grain elevator in Nanton Alberta, and Version 7.0 was in a former corner gas station and garage in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan.
Black Water Elegy, a collaboration with composer Peter Hatch, commissioned by Ontario-based NUMUS Concerts (2021), for cello, found and created soundfiles and video.
Folding Fish Follies (2021) is a neo-Dada combination on-site and off-site exhibition (physical and augmented reality) that plays with the conventions of choosing, exhibiting and preserving art. This questioning not only revisits the ever salient topics of “what is art?” and “what is an original?”, it also challenges the articulation and presentation of cultural memory, and therefore, our collective values.
Some recently exhibited physical/digital/interactive works: “Circling Towards a Possible Present” interactive gallery installation, (Sunnycrest Mall, Sunshine Coast, BC, 2017). Three interactive, game-engine driven and on-the-fly rendered figurative portraits. This work sits at the intersection of portraiture, film, puppetry, dance, graphic novels and video game traditions. The (n)Atrocity Exhibition – a house crash for the rest of us, (BAF Gallery, Vancouver, 2017) Circling Towards a Possible Present, (Sunnycrest Mall, Sunshine Coast, BC, 2017), an itinerary of irreducible evocations (Dada Lives! A Centennial Celebration Curated Group Show, Blue Ash Gallery, Ohio, USA, 2016), in Kamera / ‘After The Gold Rush’ / Venetian retirement station of a fictitious New York cabbie, Teatro di Villa Groggia, Cannaregio, (Venice, Italy, 2015), Blow 24 fps (Gibsons Public Art Gallery, Canada, 2015), junk instrument III and blackpool/dublin (Foot of Main Gallery, Vancouver, 2015), falling:catching (Krtashreya Aurodhan Gallery Garden, Pondicherry, India, 2014), In Medias Res Too (Artika Gallery, Pondicherry, India, 2014) and In Medias Res (Gibsons Public Art Gallery, Gibsons, Canada, 2013). Recent digital works include an interactive VR installation, articulated subtext, (Seaside Centre for the Arts, Canada, 2016), and 3d gestural paint loops, 3d graffiti loops (Sechelt Arts, Canada, 2014).
Talbot-Kelly’s digital & analog hybrid experimental 3d collage films Blind Man’s Eye (2007), and The Trembling Veil of Bones (2010) have screened around the world including the Venice Biennale Film Festival, London International Animation Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Anima Brussels Animated Film Festival, Jaiper International Festival of Short Films on Culture, Cork International Film Festival, and the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
In addition to his own film, animation and digital media creations, he is self taught at his “trade” in visual effects and animation. Working variously from Dublin, Vancouver, Mumbai, London, Montreal, he has made key contributions to many feature film and event television productions. These productions have been nominated for or won multiple Academy, Emmy, Gemini and Leo Awards. (imdb link)
Talbot-Kelly is the publisher and creator of five interactive, multi-lingual animated storytelling iPad apps, and five audio ebooks (Moving Tales Inc, 2010 – 2024).
Previously, in 1982-84, mentored by his father – a pioneer in advocating/developing dimensional digital software to be used by designers and artists – he immersed himself in proprietary dimensional drawing software, eventually collaborating with a number of prominant exhibition designers and architects in visualizing complex works. After receiving an “analog” Bachelor of Architecture in 1990, he continued to work as “digital hands” with exhibition designers, architects, graphic designers, and artists while experimenting with cd-rom and multimedia technology (Toronto, 1990-1995).
Contact
e: mtk537@mac.com
p: 604.375.4739